Tumgik
#Or DON'T drive angry rather
pixlerelish · 1 year
Photo
Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media
The Director and Writer Wish to Thank the Following: BILL MURRAY AND PUNXSUTAWNEY PHIL (Drive Angry 2011)
29 notes · View notes
mariocki · 11 months
Text
Tumblr media
Infinite list of favourite lyrics: 223/?
Tina Turner - GoldenEye (1995)
"You'll never know
How I watched you from the shadows as a child,
You'll never know
How it feels to be the one who's left behind.
You'll never know the days,
The nights, the tears, the tears I've cried;
But now my time has come
And time, time is not on your side!"
#favourite lyrics#tina turner#rip#goldeneye#bono#the edge#1995#james bond#wildest dreams#might seem an odd choice of Tina song to celebrate her life‚ what with the wealth of massive success she leaves; i mean River Deep Mountain#High? Proud Mary? The Best? all bangers‚ all absolute masterpieces (I am particularly in love with River Deep which I would consider a#perfectly constructed single). but this is slightly an indulgent thing on my part; rather‚ i should say‚ a sentimental choice#as slightly feral teens‚ my bff and i would drive around north wales late at night (there isn't much to do here when you're an angsty angry#teen) smoking and listening to cds we made blasted as loud as possible on her car stereo. i think the goldeneye theme was on p much#every cd we ever made; we both knew the lyrics back to front‚ we'd both scream sing along and try to hit those incredible lingering notes#and quavering vocals like Tina (obviously never doing it at all justice). I'm not sure why we loved the song so much. partly bc we were of#an age to have been around for Goldeneye as a film release and game and it was a pretty big deal‚ reinvigorating the bond#franchise after something like a decade or more of slow decline into irrelevance (don't @ me i genuinely enjoy the Timothy Dalton films but#the fact is the franchise was dead in the water by 95). more likely it was because it is simply such an infectiously good banger of a song#it's everything a bond theme should be: Big‚ dramatic‚ campy‚ a little bit eerie‚ quasi operatic. it's a whole mysterious narrative#delivered in 3 and a half minutes in a pitch perfect vocal from a legend at the height of her powers. i actually didn't know until today#that it was written by the U2 twosome (but it makes sense and i can hear it now) but regardless they wrote it specifically for Turner: for#her own specific delivery and style. it's possible to sing this song a dozen different ways following the same lyrics and music and end up#with a dozen entirely different songs. but only one was the right choice; Tina's. a dark velvet glove on a cold hard gun. there was only#ever one tina turner‚ and so it should have been. rip to a true icon.
4 notes · View notes
luveline · 2 years
Text
𝐥𝐨𝐯𝐞 𝐛𝐢𝐭𝐞𝐬 | 𝐞𝐝𝐝𝐢𝐞 𝐦𝐮𝐧𝐬𝐨𝐧 
summary eddie munson is super weird. he holds your hand too tight, he has a fascination with your neck, and he can’t give a hickey to save his life. good thing you’re super weird, too. [20k]
warnings two losers falling in love!! vampire!eddie munson, ditzy!reader (kind of), fem!reader, smut mdni (p in v, unprotected sex, oral fem receiving, general heavy petting and kissing, praise), fluff, hurt/comfort, angst (eddie struggling with guilt and grief). canon divergent (the events of volume 2 take place but there’s a mostly happy ending i.e. everyone good lives and everyone bad dies) TW eddie doesn't have suicidal thoughts, but he does think about it briefly. not with intent or anything like that though. requested here for my halloween party <3
(㇏(•̀ᵥᵥ•́)ノ)
Eddie Munson never wanted to be a vampire, and he wants that on the record. 
It's a ridiculous existence. It's embarrassing. It's nothing like all the movies and books promised him. 
He's looking at you, Bram Stoker. 
In Eddie's mind, Stoker’s nothing less than a liar and a sycophant. 
"Who's dick were you bouncing on, Stoker?" he demands to know, kicking fallen leaf mulch under his feet angrily. "Need'ta fucking impress some vampire lover with your over-exaggerated, over-powered, ridiculous descriptions? Great. Hope it was worth it. Meanwhile I'm here, self-esteem half the size of a grain of rice because I can't scale a building with my bare hands." 
Eddie would know. He's tried. 
He's not genuinely angry with Bram Stoker, but he'd rather take his frustrations out on a guy who's been dead for a hundred years than take them out on the demobats, because he doesn't want to even think about the demobats. They're all dead too. Not before they'd had (see: devoured) their pound of flesh and changed his life for the worse, though.
He shakes his head to drive out the memory like water in his ears. It's easier to pretend none of that shit in the upside down ever happened. (Impossible to pretend. He begs himself to try anyway.) 
He’s pissed because science fiction has promised him a lot of things and reality has delivered on none of them. No super strength, no impermeable skin. He is faster, but that's more a reflexive thing than anything else. And being faster doesn't make running fun. That’s impossible.
Sunlight breaks through the treeline and his skin crawls. Science fiction didn't get that right, either. The sun doesn't hurt. It's just really, really annoying.
He covers his eyes, winces at his itchy hand, pulls his sleeve over his fingers and covers his eyes again. "This blows," he says, and means it. 
In Dracula, the sun nulls Dracula’s supernatural abilities. Eddie doesn’t have any abilities worth nulling, unless you count echolocation.
He doesn’t. 
He walks another five minutes up the road toward Forest Hills when he realises you're behind him. His senses are enhanced now as a bat’s might be, hearing fine-tuned and dialled up every second of the day — which makes living in a trailer park where everyone thinks he's a murderer an acute misery — but he's as prone to distraction as anyone else. Especially when he gets stuck in a memory.
Eddie throws his gaze over his shoulder and finds you thirty or forty feet away, talking to yourself under your breath. He knows you more for your sounds than your appearance. To be able to put a face to your mindless babbling is a mystery solved. Of course you look like that. A skirt made of soft looking fabric bounces over two cute thighs, a pretty lacy corset type of thing that isn't too tight outfits your top half. You look more like a vampire than he does. 
"Hi, Eddie," you call.
His eyes widen, a deer-in-the-headlights kind of surprise. If you notice how he's frozen you don't show it, continuing to push your bike toward him. The tick of the wheels grows louder as you get closer, two hands on the handlebars with wrists draped in bracelets, both silver and fabric. 
Besides your jewellery, your arms are bare. You must be freezing. 
"Hey," he says. 
He doesn't know your name. He doesn't know how you know his, and he’s too awkward to ask. 
Your sounds peak as you close the gap. The wet scrape of your dirty black canvas shoes over shining asphalt, the soft puff of your breath, the clinking sounds of whatever trinkets you have in your bag. If he focuses, he can make out the tiniest pinches of fabric. Your short sleeves rubbing against your arms, your bra straps stretching over your shoulders. 
Eddie takes a deep breath and tries to diminish his senses. 
"Where's your van?" you ask curiously. 
"Piece of shit kicked it in the middle of town. Just my luck." 
You pause at his side, looking him up and down obviously but without the judgement or irreverent disgust he's come to expect from near about everybody in Hawkins. 
"That's not good," you say succinctly. 
It's such a genuine response that Eddie can't find it in himself to be sarcastic. 
"God awful," he agrees sullenly. 
You nod and start to walk again. Eddie falls naturally into step beside you, matching your pace without thinking. 
"You should get a bike." 
He laughs. Coughs to cover it up. "Yeah?" 
"They're way more reliable than a car, and it doesn't hurt the zone." 
Eddie squints. "The o-zone?" 
"Is there another one?" 
You're still so serious that he spares you the ridicule he might dole out to anyone else. If Dustin had said something like that he would've ripped the kid a new one, but you're rather sweet in an odd way. You have a soft manner of talking — each word sounds like you've thought its pronunciation through meticulously beforehand. 
He ignores your question and points at your bike, ring catching the sun. "Why aren't you riding it?" 
"My chain slipped." 
"So much for reliable." 
That makes you smile. Eddie feels it like a punch, a flat palm slapped into his chest. 
"You can't put the chain on yourself?" 
A brisk breeze whips your hair, your earrings. The left kisses your cheek, a silver heart-shaped hoop with pink beads that click together. You lean into it, face tilted to one side as a perplexed smile plays on your sticky lips. "You can do that?" 
"Sure, you pull it back around the gear. It's easy." He hesitates for a moment, and then feels guilty about hesitating. "I'll do it for you, if you want." 
"The guy in no. 62 has been charging me ten dollars." You don't sound as angry as you should, in Eddie's opinion. 
"I'll do it for nothing." 
You beam at him. His chest feels like a bruise. 
Pretty girls don't like Eddie. Not before Chrissy, not after. He's trying to work out your angle, what it is that you want. 
Or maybe you don't know. 
As soon as you find out who he is, you'll turn your pretty nose up at him and walk the other way. He shouldn't smile at you, he definitely shouldn't fix your bike. 
He can't help it. He's so starved for positive attention that he follows you all the way through the park, westside to east. 
He checks the driveway of his own home and smiles mildly when he spots Wayne's new car. It's new in the sense that it's different. It's actually way older than the one he'd had before, the one he'd pawned to pay for Eddie's — well, Eddie's everything. His check-ups, his court dates, his goddamn bail. In the same way that this trailer isn't the trailer, but an older, smaller one as far away from their first as possible. 
Kid, if I had the money…
Wayne hadn't needed to finish. If he had the money, they'd leave. Leave Hawkins, leave Indiana. Settle down in some other mediocre Midwestern state with all the same creature comforts and none of the "You were acquitted but literally none of us believe you didn't kill someone," motif. 
All they have now is debt, each other, and the Great Munson mug collection. 
Eddie keeps his head down as they pass the old trailer. Nobody lives inside now. Only termites. 
He can taste blood by the time they reach your home. Far from the metallicity of his human blood, Eddie's blood now harbours a bitter taste. Not quite like coffee but with that same overwhelming earthiness. He pulls his teeth from the bitten flesh of his bottom lip and quickly raises a hand to his teeth, alarmed. 
No knife-like points. Normal teeth. 
"Are you thirsty?" you ask him. 
Eddie flinches and drops his hand. You've parked your bike against the wooden lifts of your porch and are halfway up the steps to your front door, hand clasped loosely on the railing. 
His heart fucking pounds. 
"I have grape juice?" 
"Right," he says hurriedly, "right. Yeah, that would be awesome." 
Duh, you meant juice. 
You send him another endearing smile and pop up the last of your steps and into the front door. It's not locked. He doesn't follow, thinking you must live with somebody (who's gonna know exactly who he is and tell him to get lost).
He turns his attention to your bike instead. It's easy enough to fix. He rolls the bike so its handlebars are resting against your concrete driveway and covers the top bar of the metal body with his sneaker to stop it from toppling. He rolls up his sleeves and bares his arms, but pulls them back down immediately when he remembers the white-purple whorls of scar tissue lurking underneath. 
"Fuck," he mutters. Everything is a reminder, all of the time. He can't escape what happened. 
It's everywhere. 
He's getting his fingers under the chain when you reappear. You've layered up, bracelets and naked arms hidden by a black hoodie. 
The wind blows and your skirt shifts. From his position he can see a ladder hiding in your tights where your inner thighs are pressed together. He whips his gaze up like a high-school perv caught sneaking peeks in the girls locker room and notices the stitching on your chest for the first time.
"You like Dio?" he asks excitedly. 
"Who?" 
He wilts. "Uh, your hoodie. Dio." 
"I got it for three dollars in the bargain bins," you supply helpfully, all pep as you climb down the stairs and offer him a glass cup adorned in dainty enamel flowers. "Is Dio good?" 
He waves his hand at the glass apologetically. "Two seconds…" Lifting the chain with the second hand, Eddie tugs and then feeds until the links are lined up with the bumps on the big chainring. The skin on his fingertips get pinched and his eyebrows pull together in pain, but it's a mild irritant at worst and after a moment the chain is back in place. 
He pulls his hand away and wipes dark grease down the front of his jacket. "I think I did it." 
You're glowing, earrings like a metronome as you ask, "That fast? You're awesome."
He turns the pedal and your back wheel spins in time with his heart. You're awesome. When was the last time somebody who wasn't Wayne said anything like that? 
Although Dustin had told him he thought Eddie was a much cooler, more fucked up version of the guy from Van Halen the other day. 
You're just saying that 'cos we're both called Eddie, Eddie had said morosely. 
Learn to take a compliment, dude. 
When they aren't pity compliments, he might. 
Eddie lifts your bike back onto the wheels to show you that it's working perfectly. You giggle your evident pleasure. "Oh, thank you, thank you!" you say, super sweet even as grape juice sloshes over the rims of your flowered glasses and drips down your fingers. 
"Here, let me," he says, taking the glasses from your purple-stained hands. 
You kiss your hands clean which is a thing, a lot to watch. Eddie admits to himself that he thinks you're really pretty, recognises that that is a bad thing to think considering the likely very short life span of your acquaintance. God knows you won't be saying anything as friendly when you find out who he is. 
"You're so nice," you say. It feels like you're talking more to yourself than him. "Thank you. It's slipped off three times this month, and ten dollars is ten dollars. Wait, do you want ten dollars?" 
"My services were administered charitably.”
Your smile grows. You accept your glass and take a small sip, eyes lit up as Eddie steers your bike one-handed to rest against the porch. 
"Do you wanna come inside? I don't have any of the Dio, but I have Blondie." 
He holds in a throwaway comment about real rock and roll, astounded that you’d ask him. "Your folks aren't home?" 
"I'm twenty-two." 
Eddie squints at you. "Seriously?" 
"You didn't think so?" 
He shrugs. It's not that you don't look twenty two. Or even that you don't act twenty two. But it's been a long time since he met somebody living alone in the park. Forest Hills is where poverty comes to settle. 
"A boyfriend?" 
"Just me and mister Porterson." 
"That your grandpa?" 
"That's my pet fish."
He smiles. It's his first real, authentic smile in days. He's genuinely elated by your offer and your attitude, but he doesn't know how to handle it, struck with a sudden nightmare of you, afterward, telling somebody you'd invited him in and he'd tried to hurt you. It isn't fair of him to assume you'd do anything like that. You've been nothing but sweet and sincere this whole time. 
Eddie hasn't let his guard down in a long time. 
You're giving him this wide-eyed, imploring look that promptly suffocates any fear. 
And in a week, when she finds out who you are and feels betrayed, feels tricked? What then, Munson?
"You know what happened?" he asks.
"What happened?" 
"Two years ago. Chrissy… Chrissy Cunningham?" 
Don't say her fucking name. 
Your expression clears as clarity blooms. You take a step. He needs a second to realise you've come forward rather than away, fingers twitching toward his hand. 
"I know about it. I'm sorry that happened to you." 
He stares. 
This is a trick. Two years and he can count the amount of people who believe him on his two hands, and only because they'd all gone through it with him. Sometimes there are outliers, logical people who seem to realise Eddie couldn't have killed all those people, couldn't have been in all those different places without leaving any evidence behind. And sometimes there are people who agree he didn't kill Chrissy, but he's a coward for leaving her to die. (She’d already been dead.)
Eddie doesn't know what he thinks. Wayne sets the record straight every now and then with a clap on the shoulder. You did what every parent wants their kid to do. You lived. I can't ask for more than that. 
"You don't believe it?" 
"That you hurt her?" You hold his gaze, face practically impassive. "No, I don't believe it." 
He pulls in a breath that fills every inch of his chest. "I could learn to like Blondie," he says. 
— 
You're standing in the driveway of Eddie's trailer with a heavy bag over your shoulder, face to face with a man who kind of looks like him but not really. You assume it's his uncle because who else could he be? If you hadn't seen him here you'd never guess. 
"Eddie's mom must've had strong genes," you say. You bring your shoulder up toward your cheek thoughtfully. "He didn't get any of your face. Was she pretty? Eddie's really pretty." 
"She was," he says, peering down his nose at you. 
"I got sandwiches. Do you want one?" 
"What kind?" 
"I have ham and cheese, or ham and lettuce and tomato, or I have pumpernickel cookies. Is Eddie a vegetarian?" 
"Why?" 
"'Cause I only brought one cheese and cucumber, and I have dibs." 
He climbs down the last couple of steps and is still taller but definitely less imposing, face covered in scratchy salt and pepper stubble and crows feet deeply embedded into the corners of his eyes. He looks like a man who has been tired for a very long time. You make a mental note to bring him some lavender for his pillow on your next visit. 
"You're Eddie's new friend?"
You nod your head briskly. "Yes, sir. I'm Y/N." 
He opens his box of camels like a pro, bottom pressed to his chest. He tucks a cigarette between his lips and pulls his lighter out. He doesn't light it. 
"It's nice to meet you," he says eventually, voice warming. 
You search through the mess of your skirt for the zipper on your bag and peel it open, pulling out your tupperware of cookies and cracking them open to release the fragrant smell of cinnamon and almonds. It's a heady scent, fitting for the holiday season approaching. 
You offer Eddie’s uncle a cookie.
"Thought pumpernickel was bread," he says gruffly, taking one. 
"It is, but there's this little town in France that makes these every year at Christmas and they call them pumpernickel biscuits," — he takes a bite and winces at the hard snap — "you're s'posed to dip them in hot chocolate." 
"You don't say." 
You nod happily and he moves aside to let you pass. 
"Thanks, kid." 
You turn back to him with your fingers curled around the door handle. "Of course! It's really nice to meet you, Mr. Munson, sir." 
"Wayne is fine." 
You laugh and repeat his name in a similarly rough voice, letting yourself in as Eddie had told you to do. You find him immediately in a man-made corner of the living room, pale and in his pyjamas. The trailer is open planned, a living room they’ve divided by propping a couch against the kitchen counter, a slim hallway leading to a cramped bathroom and the single bedroom. It's exactly like in your home. 
You're somewhat surprised to see him in pyjamas. Eddie doesn't wear comfy looking clothes out of the house — you've only ever seen him in jeans and jackets like a real rockstar. 
"Are you ready?" you ask.
You've invited him to come and search for bugs with you. Catching any kind of bug, whether beetle or butterfly or spider, is really scary, but you need to be able to catch them to draw them. 
You'd expressed this to him over the phone and he'd said, "I can come and help. I have good reflexes." 
He rubs his hands over his knees. There's a blanket pooled around his feet, a quilt he must sleep with, and the room is decorated with not a whole lot of stuff but enough to make you take a step back. 
"Is this your room?" you ask, enchanted. 
"Kind of." He pulls his hair from behind his ear, obscuring a pale cheek. "I don't think I can come with you today, I'm sorry. I meant to call you." 
You toy with a dark thigh high sock as you ease out of your shoes, height drastically decreasing. "That's okay, we can stay here. I brought you a sandwich. I brought you two sandwiches," you correct. 
He nods. Rather sadly, in your opinion. "Alright. Thanks." 
You step over a tented paperback and hand off the cookies before sitting down beside him on the couch he's occupying. It's smaller than the one against the wall and round like a clam, lots of room for your legs to stretch out. 
"I feel like a pearl," you say. 
You and Eddie have been friends for a little while now. Long enough for you to realise he's either depressed or mentally unwell in some way. You hardly mind keeping him company on his bad days if he needs somebody, so drawing bugs will have to wait. 
His hair is limp, not totally greasy but not super clean either. His face looks fresh enough, though the bags under his eyes make you frown. 
You pull your purse into your lap, thighs covered by the thin layers of your midi skirt. "I have just the thing for you," you murmur. 
"Yeah? Bring me another bracelet?" 
You like that he sounds eager. Making his bracelet had been a challenge, lots of knotting and double knotting, three restarts and one small under the breath tantrum. It's not anything special, black and white hearts seven strands wide, but he'd been very appreciative. 
"No, but I can make you another one if you want. I mastered the inverse chevron last night." 
He hums. You pull a saran wrapped sandwich from the depths of your crowded bag, glad to see it's mostly intact. When you open it up you find that it's the ham and lettuce and tomato one, so you drop it into his lap haphazardly and move onto the next. 
"Aha! Here," you pull a cucumber from your sandwich. "For you." 
He takes it between two tentative fingers. "Thank you?" 
"For your eyes." 
"There's cheese on it." 
"I'll still work," you assure him. 
"M'not putting cheese on my eyes." 
You laugh because he probably shouldn't put cheese on his eyes, cucumber adjacent or otherwise. "Okay, don't. I'll make you a hot towel." 
He drops his hand on your arm as you go to stand. You like how he touches you, soft but not scared. "You just got here. Stay here." He pats you nicely. "Tell me about work last night." 
You settle heavily into the seat beside him, your thigh to his thigh, your hip squished against his hip, doughy flesh separated by nothing more than a strappy tank top and a cotton long-sleeve t-shirt. His heat quickly becomes yours, a sinking transference of warmth. 
"Well," you begin, cheek turning into the couch to face him. "It was mostly okay. I dropped another plate, but this time it didn't have a stack of waffles on it." 
He smiles ruefully and sinks back as you had. Neither of you eat your sandwiches. "Progress. Taking it out of your pay?" 
"Yes, definitely." 
"Discrimination." 
"That's what I said! I said, Sarah, I was born with butterfingers and you know that." 
"She didn't budge?" 
"Dishwashing all week next week. Whatever, though, 'cause it's Saturday." 
He laughs and shakes his head, his gaze dropping to your neck. He does that sometimes. You can't blame him; you wear a varying assortment of necklaces because you think they're pretty, and you're glad he likes them too. 
"See my new one?" 
"What?" 
"New necklace." You look down at your chest and pull the newest addition from between the cups of your bra. "It's real silver." 
"It's nice." 
"It's surprisingly heavy. Wanna feel?" 
"That's okay," he says, slightly strained. 
Right, you think. I'm talking a lot. 
You press your lips together in a mild pout and look at him through appreciative eyes. He's a very pretty boy, all soft and pale and sweet dark curls.
"Do you want me to put your hair up?" 
His lips part before he talks. "I don't know if you should." 
"Sure I should. It's getting in your eyes, right?" You take his hand where it's laid unsuspectingly in his lap and slip the hair tie from around his wrist, his fingertips tickling the inside of your palm. "Sit forward, Eddie." 
He takes a deep breath, holds it, and sits up. You twist and then realise you need some more height, pushing a leg under yourself to kneel next to his lap. 
You weave our fingers softly into the hair at the front of his face and rake away in lieu of a brush. After it's mostly tamed you pull it all into one hand and wrap the tie at the base of his head. You hum to yourself as you go, pleased when his lovely curls behave. 
"Voilà," you announce, moving back on your haunches. 
He breathes out. "Thank you." 
You reach for a curl you'd missed at the very front and encourage it behind his ear. He has subtle indents in his cheeks today like he's in need of a good meal, and his skin is colder than it should be when you flatten your palm. 
"You need something to eat," you fret. Your fingertips stroke under his eye, your thumb his smile lines. 
He moves away slowly. 
You pull your hand back into your lap. "Maybe we can go out and get something, if you don't like the sandwich?" 
"What?" he asks, pale lips taut as he simpers at you. "Are you kidding? This is about to fix everything that's wrong with me." 
His enthusiasm emboldens you. "It so will! There's ham and cheese too, if you prefer that one." 
"Get it! I'm gonna eat both of them." S
Eddie eats both of his sandwiches and you eat your own, the two of you with your heads dropped back against the couch as you watch TV. There's a guy you've never seen before running around the streets of Chicago city centre looking for people to be in his play. Eddie's seen it before. He repeats dialogue in time with the characters, performing each line. Impressive, what with how tired he looks. 
"What did he just say?" you ask, mouth full of cucumber.
"He said he's gonna throw himself off a bridge," Eddie informs. "Poor guy. I know the feeling." 
You swallow harshly.
"Seriously?" 
Your sad tone surprises him. 
"I- No, I'm kidding," he says, scratching the base of his throat, friendship bracelet his only adornment.
His nervous itching makes you even more worried. 
"If you did wanna do that, you can talk to me-" 
He baulks, tongue poking out past his lips as he licks the corner of his mouth. "Thanks, sweetheart," he says, pet name like a kiss. It sounds silly but it really feels like one, right in the centre of your chest. "But I'm fine. Promise. It was a bad joke." 
"Okay," you say, letting your suspicion shine through. You hold his eyes. 
You haven't known Eddie long. It feels like you met yesterday, though really it's been two or three weeks. You fit together in a way you hadn't expected and adore more than you can articulate, two funny puzzle pieces.  
"Well, I just wanted you to know. I like being your friend, I don't want you to disappear."
He laughs and licks his lips, a rough, chesty sound. "I don't want you to disappear either." 
Tires crunch outside, a shushing sound and then the sharp shriek of a jeep being put into park. Eddie perks up considerably, his shoulders straightening. 
"Hey, Chief," Wayne calls. 
Trailer walls. Basically made of cardboard. 
"Hey, Wayne. Where's the kid?" 
You can't hear what Wayne says after that, words stolen by the TV. 
"Is that Chief Hopper?" you ask, trying to catch a glimpse of him through the mostly shuttered blinds. 
"Yeah, he- He's friends with Wayne." 
"Why's he wanna know where you are?" 
"'Cause I got into so much trouble." 
You bite your tongue. His tone is hard, not stern but almost, and you realise you've overstepped as you usually do. You want to apologise but you don't want to pick the wound, eager to gloss over and make him smile again. 
"It's pretty cool, isn't it?" you ask him.
"What?" 
You spread your legs wider to slide onto your thighs and make him the taller one again, legs bent in a 'W' shape. "Coming back from the dead! First Will Byers, then Hopper." 
Something surfaces in his expression. An irony. 
"The undead," you croon, aiming for a smile, a laugh. 
He cracks. "The undead," he agrees, smiling in bemusement. His eyes are a funny shade of brown. 
Eddie shoo’s you home early that night but tries to do it kindly. He feigns exhaustion, a facade that's difficult to uphold when his entire body is thrumming with want. If there's one thing Eddie hates about being a vampire (there are literally hundreds of things he hates, but this one's special) it's that he wants to hurt the people he likes a thousand times more than the people he doesn't. 
He can't explain it. Your blood is more appealing than any lonesome stranger's. Your pulse is practically music to his ears when you sit beside him. He'd kill himself before he ever hurt you, though. Or that's what he likes to think. Whether he has that amount of control is debatable. 
No. He would kill himself before he hurt you, or Wayne, or any of his friends. 
Steve can see the way that he's feeling on his face. 
Hopper's delivery set to one side, a tall glass with blood congealed in a sticky ring at the bottom, Eddie curls under his huge quilt and tries not to pass out. Blood sate feels the same as a thanksgiving food coma. It's awesome. 
He hates how good it feels. 
"Stop feeling guilty," Steve says. 
"He doesn't look guilty to me," Dustin says beside him, taller than the last time Eddie had seen him but still miles off of Steve's tall stature. He's changed his hat again, this one a garish green. It's not a good look. 
"He looks like he's napping," Robin says, delighted. 
"Can you guys go home?" Eddie asks. 
"Shithead." 
"What Steve means to say," Robin corrects, grinning her huge, catching smile, "is that no, we aren't going home. We brought games." 
"I don't wanna play games." He does. Eddie needs the distraction, because eventually the blood sate will fade and all that will remain will be self-revulsion and a cruel desire to do something awful. 
"I do not care even slightly," Steve says, deadpan, as he sits right there next to Eddie where you'd been sitting before. Steve's nowhere near as soft and he doesn't smell as nice, but Eddie's honestly glad someone is willing to sit next to him at all. 
"Ouch, what the fuck?" 
Dustin looks up from where he's sat himself on the floor. Robin giggles in her seat on the coffee table. 
"Munson, are you fucking shedding? I just got stabbed." 
"They don't work like that. They retract." 
Eddie feels at his broken gums with his tongue. There's a clean incision where his fangs come out and then snap back inside after a time. They're remarkably thin, fitting in front of his natural incisors neatly. 
Steve grumbles, hips lifted and hand searching under his butt for whatever it is that jabbed him. He retrieves exactly what Eddie had been expecting but hadn't had the forethought to prepare a lie about with a shocked gasp.
"Is this an earring? You don't have your ears pierced." 
He swallows, knowing it's a very guilty gesture, and meets Steve's eyes straight on. 
Funny how Steve's hair speaks as much as his expression, bobbing as he nods his head to emphasise each word, "Munson, do you have a girlfriend?" 
Silence. 
"...Not really." 
"Holy shit," Dustin says, sounding extremely pleased. "No way." 
Robin tucks her short hair behind her ears, hands paused in disbelief at her neck. "Actually?" 
"I have a friend," Eddie admits. 
"Thank god," Steve says, dropping your heart earring onto Eddie's thigh. The silver feels extremely hot over his pyjamas, like it's been held in the centre of a blistering hearth. 
"I really thought Steve was gonna have to take one for the team and give you a pity handie," Robin says agreeably, scratchy voice coloured by genuine awe. 
Eddie groans, "Harrington, get this shit off of me. You know I can't touch that." 
"I forgot," Steve lies. "Can you wait? My hands are busy." 
He has Steve put your earring between two pieces of kitchen towel and holds onto it. He doesn't see you for a week, and he keeps your damn earring in his pocket that entire time worried it's gonna slip out and brand him at any second. 
Finally, you call him. He pretends he wasn't waiting. 
"Hello," you say, like you're announcing something. 
"Hey. How are you?" 
"Eddie, I need your help. Badly." 
He flinches up where he'd been leaning casually, hard enough to make Wayne jump. Eddie smiles at him placatingly and mouths a poor sorry, turning away to pretend there's a semblance of privacy to be found in such close quarters. 
"Are you okay?"
"I gotta find a rainbow leaf beetle. Do you have a torch?" 
"...What?" 
"They only come out at night, so I'm gonna go look but I don't have a torch that works." 
He relaxes, the lilting cadence of your voice enough to make his whole night. You sound so pretty even through the phone. He suspects you could hold any pitch, deep or high, and you'd still sound nice. 
It's all in the way you — he says this with love — perform the words. You speak like each word you're saying has equal importance, and it's calming.
Even when you say stuff that's nonsense to him.
Right now, you don't sound upset or even worried about not having a torch, simply curious to know if he has one. If he focuses hard (and he's been trying not to, as you deserve your privacy) he can hear you all the way across the park, shifting from foot to foot in your bedroom, carpet crushed under your heels. 
The action makes him think this might be more urgent to you than you'd first admitted. 
"I have a torch." He also has amazing night vision. Like, impeccable. "Can I come help?" 
"You want to?" 
"I'd love to. Are you going out tonight?" He leans back to glance out the window. "The rain is finally stopping." 
"Yeah, tonight! Is that okay for you? We could go tomorrow if you can't." 
You're willing to change your plans now that he's asked to go with you. It's a gesture as lovely as you are. Eddie doesn't think you'd ever think it of yourself; your kindness is so intrinsic you don't notice it, like the fine stitching of a leather bound book. Integral and widely unappreciated.
"That's perfect."
Wayne raises an eyebrow when Eddie relays the conversation. "You're going out in the middle of the night with this girl to… look for bugs." 
Eddie crosses his arms over his chest. "I swear." 
"Be honest with me, kid." 
"I am!" 
Wayne swirls his coke can around in his hand as he thinks, a reluctance evident in his scowl. Eddie knows he's way too old for a guardian's oversight like this but he lets Wayne have a say because Wayne loves him, and Eddie doesn't ever want to put his old man through the turmoil he went through when he ran away. If that means a curfew in his twenties, Eddie's okay with that. 
"If you're going to have sex with this girl, I'd prefer you did it here. You have to treat women with respect."  
Eddie shivers, full body. "Wayne," he groans, covering his face. He can feel his cheeks pink under his palms, that's how quickly his embarrassment rises. 
"I know you're more responsible these days, and you're a grown up. If you want a girlfriend and you want to do adult things with her-" 
"Jesus Christ." 
"- then that's alright. You don't have to fool around outside." 
He drags his hands down on his face, pained. "It's not like that. You met her, you know she's…" 
"Strange?" 
"Alternative." 
"No, you're alternative. She's cooky." 
"Don't," he says. He knows his uncle isn't actually being cruel, so he lets it lie and fights for his own cause. "We aren't messing around. She genuinely wants me to go find these bugs with her. And…" He hates himself. "She has her own place, you know? If we were going to-" 
Wayne seems stricken by the same mortified embarrassment as Eddie, raising a calloused hand in surrender. "Spare me." 
"Thank you," Eddie says, spinning on his heel to hide in the bathroom for a while. It's only when he's sitting on the closed toilet does he realise Wayne hadn't mentioned his more dangerous ailment. For a time, he'd been a normal (debatable) person having a normal (horrifying) conversation with his dad. Not a vampire. Not somebody who ruins everything he touches. 
"It's so quiet," you whisper. 
For you, Eddie thinks. 
You're in the forest surrounding the aptly named Forest Hills trailer park, wielding your borrowed torch carefully into the dark. Eddie's following in your footsteps, trying not to smell everything that's on you today and failing. 
You smell like a person as everybody does. Over that is your soap, a faint hint of milk and honey that sticks to your skin even after you've washed it away. Over that is your deodorant, 'unscented', and over that is your perfume, which he likes most. It's a mix of smells, some Eddie doesn't know and some he does. There's lavender, though that might be down to the bunch you'd brought for his uncle wrapped in newspaper, and there's something fruity he can't quite put his finger on, all of it wrapped up in a cloying pairing of vanilla and coconut. 
"Eddie?" 
"What?" 
"Are you okay? You're almost as quiet as the trees." 
If only you knew the trees aren't quiet. 
"I'm alright," he says quickly, catching up to you where you stand a few feet ahead. "What are we looking for?" 
Best change the subject. How to explain he'd been smelling the notes of your perfume? 
"They rest on tree trunks. You have to be careful, any sudden sound or light will scare them away. But if you flash the torch on them, they shine like oil stains." 
He loves when you talk. "Where'd they come from?" 
"Place called Snowdon. They're so rare, they think there's only about a thousand alive there." 
"Well, how did they get here?" 
You laugh under your breath, so quiet he would've missed it if he wasn't enhanced. "I don't know. How do beetles get to different places?" 
"They fly?" 
A twig crunches under your shoe. 
Eddie tips his head to the side, thinking. "If there's only a thousand, how-" He stops, your circle of torch light growing further and further away. "Are you sure that they live here?" 
"No, but if they do we'll be the first to find them." 
"So they've never found any out here? In- In the midwest?" 
"Not yet. Where'd you go?" 
He shakes his head in an affectionate disbelief. "Right behind you." 
You search in silence for a while. Eddie wishes he could say he was mad, or even mildly annoyed, wishes he had even the slightest regard for his own time, but really he thinks any time with you is time well spent. Especially if it's helping you do something you want to do. Whether you find your rainbow leaf beetle or not, he feels better knowing he's out here with you to keep you safe and in company. 
Conversation is sparing. He doesn't mind. Your footsteps fill the sound and he finds even that stupid detail charming, the crunch, the pick up. His own are silent, a rare advantage to his terrible affliction. 
"Any other beetles you want me to keep an eye out for?" he whispers. 
"I'm not sure…" You turn to face him, torch pointed at your shoes. Rubber toes touched together, you lean in until you're all he can smell. Perfume. Blood. "If you see any cool spiders, too." 
"You have the mason jar?"
"You know I do." 
More than you realise, he thinks. The glass clicks in your bag. 
There's enough light reflected to see the most minute details of your face. Your nose, the circle of your irises but not their colour. He suspects Eddie from early '86 wouldn't have been able to see hide nor hair, and it wouldn't shock him if you were technically blind right now.
"Thanks for coming out with me. I was gonna ask you." 
"Yeah?" 
"Yeah, but I didn't want to come on too strong." He can sense your smile even though he can't see it. It's in the way your breathing deepens. "I know I can be a lot to deal with." 
"Who told you that?" 
"What?" 
Eddie doubles down.. "Who told you that?" he sounds heartbroken. 
He kind of is. Yeah, you're weird — Who cares? Who isn't? — but you're not a lot to deal with. He doesn't 'deal' with you.
"Everybody tells me that. All the time." 
"Everybody's stupid." To say it so loudly, scathingly, is sweet. It's therapeutic. "They are. This whole town is stupid." 
Your fingertips touch his thigh. He's willing you to turn the torch up and see his face, because he has a lot of feelings on display that he isn't brave enough to say out loud. 
"You never make me feel stupid," you say softly. 
"You're not." 
You giggle breathily at his vehemence, fingertips pressing in with a touch more pressure before you pull away and shine the torch deep into the trees. 
"This whole town is stupid," you mumble. "But not you." 
He thinks of his friends who are definitely stupid, but he loves anyways. He's about to add them to the not-stupid (subjectively) list when he remembers Steve's discovery: your earring burning a hole in his pocket. He'd been carrying it for long enough now to forget all about it. 
"Hey, I have something for you." 
"You do?" 
"Don't get too excited. It's not a gift." 
He digs in his pocket for the tissue paper wrapping and hisses in shock as the silver plating of your hoop graces his index finger. You shine the torch at him. His eyes ache like he's been stabbed and he slams them closed, hand pulled to his chest. 
How embarrassing. 
"Eddie, what happened?" you question loudly.
He winces at the sudden overstimulation. Slowly, he blinks, and finds you staring at him in a worry that softens every feature, even your nose. He doesn't know the logistics. 
"It's okay. Stabbed a paper cut on the back. Your earring's in my pocket, the heart?" 
"The hoop? I thought I lost it." Your worry turns to confusion and then melds into joy. You step forward and fish in his jacket pocket for your earring. 
"Steve found it." 
"'The hair'?" 
"Yeah, the hair." 
You both laugh and yours heightens when you find the earring, pulling it out like a knife to be brandished. "Yes." 
"I meant to tell you a dozen times that I had it." 
"You're the best." 
There's a crunch of wood somewhere to the left like something heavy falling over.
The forest sprawls in every direction and the trees tower, their presence looming as skyscrapers. The wind ruffles the topmost branches and their trunks groan with pressure. It's enough to freak Eddie out super sense or not, feeling suddenly like he couldn't protect you. He could hear the individual droplets of drool dripping from a lynx's bloody maw, and he can sense each twig underfoot before he takes his next step, but none of that is going to keep you safe in the face of real danger. 
"Maybe we should head back," he says tentatively.
"Okay. Do you want to come over?" 
His breath catches. "You want me to?" 
"Yeah, we can watch movies, I have leftover pasta." 
That sounds more like what he should've been thinking. "I don't wanna keep you up." 
"What kind of pasta?" he asks. 
The torch flickers. "With the tiny tomatoes. You'll like it, super creamy." 
"How do you know?" 
"You like Alfredo," you say astutely, hitting the torch into the palm of your hand. It flashes weakly, the shadow of the trees flickering and so dark they're violet. 
"Try tightening the handle." 
You turn the barrel of the torch and the light switches off completely. You try to undo what you've done to no success, the sound of plastic rubbing plastic almost as loud as your heartbeat. Your pulse falters and then grows to racing when the light fails to come back on. 
"Eddie," you say, sounding unsure. It's a new sound on you. "I don't know where we are. How are we gonna get home?" 
Your admission is like a dousing of ice water over his head. "You don't know what direction we came from?" 
"No, do you?" 
Eddie wouldn't know if he couldn't hear the sound of the electricity pylon buzzing somewhere to the right. But how can he explain that? "Uh, we were turned around."
You creep to his side and grab his arm with both hands. "Are you sure?" 
"Hey," he says gently. "Hey, it's okay. I know where we are. We'll be fine." 
"Are you sure?" you ask again. 
"I'm positive." 
You take a deep breath that doesn't erase your shakiness, a failed attempt at self-soothing. "I really don't know where we are." 
"You're not afraid of the dark, are you?" 
"Not really… I don't wanna get lost out here." 
"You won't. I know how to get back. C'mon," he prompts, pulling his arm to encourage you forward. 
You let go of him and navigate a few steps by yourself. He weaves through the trees, waiting for your heartbeat to slow. 
It doesn't. He opens his mouth to reassure you again when you gasp, kicking your foot against a root and tripping. You barely fall, catching yourself on the trunk of a tree, and Eddie remembers himself. You can't see the trees. That's why you're worried. You can't see anything. 
Then the smell of blood hits him like a freight train. 
Your hand stings where you caught yourself, palm scraped down against harsh bark. 
"Shit," you mumble. 
You're panicking badly, and you're confused as to why Eddie isn't. Not only was it fucking stupid of you to come out here with only one torch, it was stupid of you to assume you'd remember what way was home. It was stupid of you to come here tonight for that stupid beetle, and stupid of you to drag Eddie along. You're an idiot, and now you're bleeding. 
Your eyes sting with tears, pain like a popped seal. I'm so stupid. 
"Hey," Eddie says, his tone silky soft, "you're okay. Let me help you up." 
You hold your hands out. 
"Eddie, this is weird." Hopefully he understands that weird means scary.
He takes your hands, fingers closing slowly over your bloody palm. His breath is loud as he pulls you up toward him like he's panicked but his grip stays kind, and you abandon the notion when he rubs over your knuckles with his thumb. "It's alright." 
He doesn't sound the same. 
"Eddie, we can't see." 
"We'll go slowly, okay? I'll put my hand out and we'll walk around anything that gets in the way." 
"Yeah," you say hurriedly, heart bump-bump-bumping against your ribcage. 
He keeps one hand, the injured one, and starts to drag you slowly through the trees. His grip tightens as you go until it starts to ache, until it feels like it might bruise. 
"Ouch, Eds. You're hurting me," you say, going for a lightly teasing tone and missing the mark. 
Instantly, he eases off. "Sorry, sweetheart. You hold onto me, alright?" 
You do as he'd asked, hand clinging to him as he leads. He doesn't squeeze you again, walking slowly as he'd promised, and the closer you get to the edge of the forest the clearer it becomes. Light pollution from the centre of town leaches through the trees like water trickling from an overflowing basin. 
His second hand is in his pocket. 
"Here," he says after you've traversed to the very edge of the forest. "There's the park. We're bona fide explorers." 
He looks out toward the park and you look at the side of his face. Something isn't right. Something uncanny. 
You drop your gaze from his face to your joined hands. They come apart, blood smeared in both your palms like two halves of a dripping heart. 
— 
There is something weird about Eddie. As a residential freak of Hawkins you think you're an authority in this, and you don't feel guilty for judging him. Your brain can't stop going over your night in the forest. For days you play the scenes back and for days you lose the details. You forget how the wind had tousled his hair, how he'd smelled, what he'd said. 
You remember the way he'd squeezed your bloody hand. You remember the way he'd spoken, strained. 
Not strained like he didn't want to comfort you, he had, but strained. 
Restrained. 
You're poking at the shallow cut half-healed now in your palm at work when a dude walks in, very tall, handsome, and gunning straight for you. 
You straighten your badge and hide your bracelet heavy wrists behind your back, receding slightly as he approaches. He slows in front of you. 
You have a light bulb moment. 
"The hair," you say.
He scowls. "He told you that, huh. Typical." 
"You're Steve?" 
"That's me." Steve crosses his arms across his chest, his back to a booth, your back to the diner bar. "You're Eddie's new friend." 
"What counts as new?" A month and a half doesn't feel so new to you. 
"Trust me, you're new." 
He has the strangest patch covering the outside of his left wrist, the same peculiar scarring that you can see on Eddie's waist when he reaches for a glass out of the kitchen cabinet. You don't ask because you're not a dick no matter how curious you find yourself, but it makes your heart skip. What is that? You'd assumed Eddie's was road rash. Now you're not so sure. 
He tucks it under his arm. 
You meet his suspicious gaze. 
"You want coffee?" 
"No." 
You kick your foot, shoe sliding over the shiny waxed floor with a squeal. "Is Eddie okay?"
"Did you want to come to a party next Friday?" 
"No," you say honestly. "Like a cult?" 
"What?" 
"Are you initiating me into your cult?" 
He finally smiles, eyes creased with amusement. "I'm inviting you to our club." 
"Club where you chew on each other?" 
You look pointedly at Steve's wrist. 
"No. Club where we play board games and drink jiffy pop. Come or don't, doesn't matter." 
"If it doesn't matter, why are you asking me?" 
It's a strangely intense conversation to have this early in the morning. Patrons chatter about work, coffee gets poured. The diner smells of syrup and sugar and bitter cold-press. You're both in work apparel, both refusing to move back. If this is some kind of shovel talk then that's fine, and if it's a test you're determined to pass, even if Eddie's been super weird lately. 
"I'll come if you promise not to eat me," you say. 
"It's really not that kind of club." 
"I had the weirdest visit in the entire world today," you declare, stopping in front of Eddie's porch with a smile. 
"Yeah?" he asks without looking up, guitar in his lap and pen scribbling over a lined notebook.
You wait for him to stop before you continue, leaning forward with both arms braced on the porch by his feet. "Steve Harrington came to see me, and he was super mean. You said he was nice." 
He frowns at you. "I told you he was a dick." 
"You like him when you tell me stories." 
"How mean?" Eddie asks, patting the seat beside him. 
You climb up onto the porch and plop down onto the couch, worn leather cold with the weather and damp in the seams. 
You take a strand of his hair and curl it around your finger. "Not really super mean, but he was, like, acting like I killed a baby." 
"He's like that." 
You sigh and lean your cheek against the couch cushion, watching Eddie's stubble move as he tamps down a teasing smile. "He invited me to a party next weekr." 
"It's not a party- Sweetheart, what are you doing?" 
You tickle his cheek with the end of his hair. "Nothing." 
"M'gonna sneeze." 
You tickle him again, fine dark strands brushing over his pale cheek. He's a very ashen guy, you've found. Likely because he barely goes out in the sun and he doesn't eat enough. You draw circles around the apple of his cheek and grin softly at his growing smile, a sweet, silly thing. 
"I'll tickle you back," he warns. 
"Promise?" 
He steals the curl back and tucks it behind his ear. 
"You're not a cannibal, are you?" 
Eddie chokes on air. You startle at his coughing and move to pat his back, palm slapping a steady rhythm into his shoulder. When he calms down you run your hand down the length of his arm, long sleeve t-shirt soft beneath your touch. You linger at his wrist and decide to hold it. 
He drops his pen and your hand travels until he's caught your thumb. He kneads it in his fingers.
"I'm not a cannibal. Why would you think that?" 
"I don't, but you and Steve are in your club, right?" 
"Hellfire wasn't like that," he says heatedly.
"No, not- Not that one." 
He doesn't say anything. 
"You have… He has this scar, on his wrist. Like something bit him, or-" He turns to you and he looks formidable and upset and himself, not mad at you but raw emotion in his expression anyhow. It's gone as quick as it came. 
"When all that… stuff happened," he begins quietly, "we got hurt. A couple of us." 
You drop your head, ashamed at having pried.  "I'm sorry, you don't have to tell me anything else."
"Don't be sorry…" He squeezes your hand and lets it go. "Don't worry about it." 
"Okay." 
"We usually call ourselves a party, these days. Not a club." 
"Do you really play board games and drink jiffy pop?" 
"Sometimes we get really crazy and order a pizza. You should come." 
You realise as he says it how much his wanting you to go had mattered to you. Eddie's your friend, and you don't think that you're going to stay friends much longer.
"You think your friends will like me?" you ask, voice descending to a new kind of gentle. 
He puts down his guitar and his notebook. His full attention is something you've come to really enjoy, not because of the hunger you often see flitting across his face — though that's neat —, but because of the inklings of adoration clinging to his smile when he looks at you. His blinking lashes. He smiles at you and just slows. A usually frenetic boy calmed. 
"Maybe not Mike. Mike doesn't like anybody. Except for Will," he muses.
"What about you?" 
"What about me?" 
"Who do you like?" 
"I like all of them." He juts his cheek toward his shoulder, conceding, " I think Dustin's my favourite. He's funny. He's funnier than I am, and he's the smartest kid I've ever met. And he knows it." 
Your eyes focus on the pink outline of his upper lip as he speaks. It's a pleasure to be this close, and see him in this kind of crazy detail. When you go home tonight you might try to draw him. You'll probably forget.
It's the kind of smile that deserves to be immortalised. 
"I really like your smile," you tell him, hoping it'll last a little longer. 
It stretches. The pink outline turns white. "Shut up." 
"I do. I've seen a thousand different smiles but I've never met someone who smiles like you do." 
"How's that?" he asks, edging toward you, face a mirror in which you can see your own charmed expression. 
"Like you," — you shake your head with your lips parted — "know a secret. Something you won't tell anybody." 
His smile abruptly ends. 
You've nothing if not a talent for saying the wrong thing. 
"A good secret," you amend. 
He picks up his acoustic and gives it an experimental strum. "Maybe one or two," he agrees. 
Relief catches you. You nibble at the inside of your lip and watch his fingers work over the neck of his guitar, tipping your head so you can read the words he's markered over the body. 
"This machine slays dragons," you murmur to yourself. "Yeah? How many?" 
"Just the one." 
"Save any princesses?" 
"Not yet." He plucks at the strings, lost in thought, before turning to you with eyebrows raised. "Can you play?" 
You exhale out of the corner of your mouth as he pushes the guitar into your lap, an arm coming around your shoulder, the other reaching to guide your curled forefinger to the strings. You turn to face him, watching him talk with a growing fondness. 
"It's easy, I swear. We'll do Call Me. Blondie's basic, even a baby could play it." 
He realises you aren't listening and raises his gaze, shiny brown irises stuck on your lips. This close, it would be worse if he didn't look at them. 
You glance at his, an obvious thing, half a wish. If he only lifted his chin. 
Your breath mingles. 
"It's easy," he says again, a murmur of his usual volume as his gaze pulls back up to yours. "I'll show you." 
You wonder if he can hear your heart pounding; it's deafening. You wait, and you wait, and you turn your eyes back to his guitar and clamp your fingers down against the struts so he can't see them shaking with adrenaline. 
Eddie sits beside Steve and tries not to admit to himself that Steve Harrington is, horrifyingly, his best friend (along with the rest of the party, obviously). Steve is the closest in age and Eddie can't make excuses (though he tries and tries and tries), Steve understands how much Eddie doesn't ever want to talk about anything that's happened to them, so he talks about literally everything else instead. 
"It was the weirdest pawn shop I've ever been in. They had, like, a wall of combi's playing the same video at the same time but all slightly delayed." 
Eddie blinks. 
Steve turns his head from the TV, having expected a response. "Did you say something?" 
"No." Then, because he's not a dick. "Sorry, Harrington. Want me to sit on your other side?" 
"What for?" Steve says. Not because he denies how he's hard of hearing, but because he denies having conversations with Eddie. 
He does end up moving to Steve's other side with a pathetic excuse. "I can't see the TV." 
Steve doesn't say a word until he's sat down again. "Sorry I was mean to your girlfriend." 
"Yeah, what was that about?" 
"I was cranky because it was early and I don't want her to damage the integrity of the party." He gives equal weight to both reasons. 
Eddie snorts at him. "Since when do you care about the integrity of the party?" Steve barely acknowledges that they are a party. He thinks that's a very nerdy way to say friends. 
"Since always, dipshit." 
"And inviting her to join the party was the solution because…?" 
Steve drinks the rest of his coke and pretends to really care about what's on TV. "If," he begins after a minute, refusing to look at Eddie, "something happens with her, and something happens to you, that damages the integrity of the party." 
"Steve," Eddie says, jaw dropped down to his chest, "do you have a crush on me?" 
"Oh my god," Steve mutters. "Oh my god," he says louder. "I can't stand you." 
To prove his point, he gets up from the couch with a wrinkled nose, stops to tap his shoe gently against Max's where she's sitting in the armchair across from the coffee table, and disappears into his kitchen. 
Steve Harrington cares about me enough to give Y/N the shovel talk. 
He feels kind of great about it. 
But he's not sure your the one who needs warning. 
That night in the forest, Eddie had almost snapped. There are rules to follow if he wants to keep people safe, self-imposed, Hopper-imposed, and he's broken too many with you already, the most important being no close proximity when he's hungry. Eddie doesn't even realise he is hungry half the time. He'll be standing by you and he'll want to touch you, and suddenly it's like he's three weeks in to the month without sating. 
He thinks about kissing you and suddenly he's thinking about biting you, and hurting you, and it's literally tearing him up from the inside out. 
How can he want to do that to you? 
"You look so depressed and pathetic," Dustin says out of the blue. 
Eddie pouts and falls back into the couch, Steve's fancy throw falling onto his shoulder. "I used to like you," he says, taking in Dustin's outfit with a kind of parental approval. He's getting older and it shows, slightly more handsome than he had been — he's kept all his baby weight and it suits him, his full cheeks surrounded by the softest brown curls Eddie has ever seen. The outfit stays immature, a funny t-shirt and ill-fitting pants. 
"Sad. You have a sad face," Dustin says. 
"Go play with your nerd squad, please." 
He doesn't listen, collapsing in Steve's still-warm seat like a cheap tent and crossing longer, thicker arms over his chest. He smiles at Eddie genuinely. "Where's your girlfriend?" 
"No." 
"Where's Y/N?" 
Eddie tips his head so he can see past the coffee table and points to where you're almost hidden, sitting with Robin on the floor by Steve's sideboard. You have a basket of tapes in front of you, the two of you trying to choose what's going in the stereo. Eddie prays for anything but Blondie. 
You will most likely choose Blondie. 
"What does she like?" Dustin asks curiously. 
"Everything, kind of. Why?" 
"I wanna know what to say when I talk to her." 
Eddie smiles at his friend's face, a soft, surprised thing. "I don't know if she knows anything about the radio but if you're happy about it she'll be happy too. She's a good listener."
Dustin picks at a piece of lint on his t-shirt bearing a white and black print of a dog wearing sunglasses. "So you talk to her?" he asks without looking up. 
"I mean, yeah. What else do you do?" 
"With a girl that likes you? Huh, let me think." Dustin laughs and ruins his own sarcasm, pointer finger laid against his chin in a show of thoughtfulness. 
"It's not like that," Eddie says lightly. 
"It could be." 
"Could it? I mean… I don't even know if she'll stick around. And I feel bad 'cos I can't be honest with her." 
"Why not?" 
"Hopper said he would literally put me in the hole if I even thought about it." There's no need to expand. Dustin would know better than anyone what he's talking about. 
He cringes at the thought, self hatred a hot poker down his throat. He must've said it to Dustin a hundred times when he finally came around from his coma (that wasn't a coma, but a death, and then a rebirth). I can't believe I put you through that. I can't believe I put you through that. I'm so sorry. 
I'm just glad you're alive, Eddie. 
And for a while, Eddie hadn't felt the same. The world he'd woken up to was hard. There had been lawyers and grief and guilt and becoming. He doesn't have the words to describe how it feels to become something new, something that needs to hurt people to live, something that will hurt people to live, whether Eddie wants to or not. 
The loss of choice is suffocating. 
Though moments like this with his friends– they don't make it 'worth it', they're just how it had to happen. There isn't a scenario where Eddie could give up. He can't leave Wayne, and he can't leave Dustin. He can live with the grief of what he is if it means other people don't have to live with grief of what he isn't. 
"Eddie, are you okay?" 
He's missed something. Dustin isn't the only one looking at him. 
He curls a hand around his forearm subconsciously. "I'm fine. I think I'm gonna go to the bathroom, actually. Gotta piss real bad." 
"Eddie-" 
"I'm fine, Henderson." He puts on a good show, patting Dustin's arm. His heart, usually so slow these days, has enough life in it to ache. 
He can't have been in the bathroom for five minutes when somebody knocks on the door aggressively. He's expecting Steve, pissed at his disappearance and likely preparing a speech on attention seeking behaviours and how they're hurting the youth of America, so he opens the door with a tired glare. 
He finds you, beaming and pretty, dressed ridiculously nicely for his idiot friends. 
"Hi," you say. He can hear something from Blondie's Parallel Lines playing from the living room, familiar because it's your favourite album. "Any room for me?" 
Eddie moves back. You close the door behind you. The bathroom becomes a vacuum of your sounds and smells. 
"They didn't have any Dio," you say with a smile. 
"I honestly wouldn't expect any different." 
"You could've brought some tapes, your mix from the van," you suggest. "I love that one." 
"Which one?" he asks, and he can't help it, whenever he's with you his voice crops to a dulcet murmur. The urge to speak to you as you speak to him is unconquerable. 
"One with the winking smile on the slipcase. I really like it." 
"You can have it." 
You lean against the sink. "I can?" 
"Mm. Whatever you want." Especially when you look like this. 
You smile at him, your 'thank you' smile, all sticky fondness and mischievousness. He has no idea what you're thinking. 
"'S a small bathroom in a huge house," you marvel. Your voice echoes "Where does he shower?" 
"There's an upstairs bathroom." 
"Two bathrooms? That's-" 
"Audacious?" 
"I was gonna say overkill." 
Your candidness has him shaking with laughter. He clutches at his sides, arms crossed and leaning forward. You visibly take in his appearance, eyes panning slowly over his clean hair. He'd taken care to look like somebody you might want to look at tonight. 
"Why don't you sit down, Eds?" you ask, eyes creased with an unreadable emotion. 
Eddie feels blindly for the toilet lid and pushes it down so he can do as you ask, wondering why you're asking.
"You look very handsome today." 
He hugs himself. "As opposed to every other day, when I don't?" 
You take a step forward, a second, hands playing with the hem of your shirt. Your outfit today is delightfully simple, a pressed black t-shirt long enough to cover the waistband of your pleated skirt. There's an expanse of thigh that makes his heart beat spin out, one longer than the other where your thigh-high is falling down.
He wants to pull it up. 
"C'mere," he says. 
You take that last step between his shoes and he reaches out, getting his fingertips under the elastic of your sock and tugging it upward over the soft fat of your leg. Your hands come up to his shoulders for balance, and you say, "No, you look handsome every day. Today you look very handsome. I made the distinction." 
He covers your thigh with both hands, looking up into your face as you look down. "You look really pretty today," he says boldly, fingers spreading behind your knee. 
"Thank you. Do you like my t-shirt?" 
It's a screen print of Debbie Harry. Eddie tries not to roll his eyes. "I love it, but your dedication to Blondie is seriously worrying, sweetheart." He gives your leg a short squeeze and pulls the most giggly smile out of you yet. 
"Like Madonna." 
"No!" he bemoans. 
You laugh and grow closer, arms on his shoulder, a hand threaded into his hair. "Cyndi Lauper?" you suggest. 
He puts a hand on your waist as you move in for a hug. Your arms wrap around his neck and the tops of his shoulders, cheek crushed to the top of his head. 
He'd ask if you were okay if he thought you weren't. You're not upset or seeking comfort. You're affectionate. You've been getting more and more touchy for weeks, as he has. Stolen touches, your almost-kiss on the porch last week. 
"No, not Cyndi Lauper," he says, his hand skirting around your back to pull you in properly. 
"R.E.M?" 
"God, no. Where are you hearing all this junk?" 
"The radio." 
"Tuned into the wrong station." 
You pet the back of his head. "Yeah," you say softly, "I think I was." 
The hug is shorter than Eddie wants it to be. You make one of your happy sounds and pull away to get your hands on his face, stroking curls from his cheeks with a protective touch. "Handsome," you say, turning your hand to stroke his cheek with your knuckles. "Pretty. You have really big eyes, Eddie, so brown, and so…" You tilt your head to one side, face inching forward. 
He turns his face to suit, to fit, breath held as you close the gap. 
"So pretty," you murmur, and kiss him. 
His hands are limp and then alive, one clutching your hip, one splaying against your chest. He can hear the thud of your heart clear as day — you're bumping with excitement as you kiss him. It's a delicate, tender thing, the party suddenly far away, the music drowned by the sounds of your breathing. You kiss as you talk, as you move, gentle but with bursts of ardency. Your lips are a blissful heat, the tip of your nose smushing into his as you part your lips over his. 
He lifts his chin higher, his neck craned to receive you. He's savouring every movement. Each pause for breath that you take. The feeling of your inhales over his quick-bruising lips. 
Your hands play in his hair so sweetly it makes his eyes burn with an embarrassing amount of emotion. He screws them closed and squeezes up your waist, steadying himself as you feel along his bottom lip with the tip of your tongue. 
You don't get much further than that, seemingly pleased with your own brazeness or perhaps his touch, eyes glowing with mirth as you pull away. 
"Sorry," you breathe, not sorry at all. "You just really looked like someone should be kissing you."
You're flushed. Eddie can practically see the heat emanating off of your cheeks. He can feel it. 
He stands up, your pulse a ringing in his ears. The wet valves of your heart opening and closing. 
"Eddie?" you ask quietly, lifting your head to meet his eyes as he walks you back into the door. 
His gums sting. A click. 
It's a compulsion. 
His hands curl around your elbows, holding you in place. Your eyes are wide with confusion, your lightly swollen lips parted. He can see the tiniest slip of your pink tongue. 
He holds your gaze as he leans in. Your eyelids flutter closed. You wrap your arms around him as he descends, totally trusting. 
He's a meaner kiss than you are. He starts slow but swiftly loses a handle on it, kisses short but insistent, hot presses like little crescent moons against your barely open mouth. 
His hands move up your arms, a near vice-like grip until he finds your sleeves. His fingers slip underneath, hands hungry for your warmth. 
You make the worst sound anyone has ever made as he moves back, like something has been ripped from you. A gutted gasp, near silent. 
He placates as he wades back in. Thumbs rubbing your arms, lips mouthing damp kisses down your face. The corner of your pout, the hill of your chin, the skin under your jaw. Your head tips back against the door with an audible thud. You exhale hard. 
Eddie can't feel his hands. 
Your pulse hammers under his lips. He kisses it once. He can't think. He can't breathe. 
"You're always cold," you whisper, your hands drifting lazily under the fabric of his t-shirt. Your fingertips trail up his spine. "But your lips are warm." 
He kisses your neck, his lips parting slowly, a hair's width a second as he sucks your skin into his mouth gently. It's barely a kiss. He does it a second time. A third. You start to laugh, a golden sound. 
The point of his fangs touch your skin and you stop. 
Eddie closes his mouth abruptly. His hand leaps to your neck and he feels your heart skip as he holds you still. "I'm sorry," he says, nose rubbing over the damp spot he's left behind, your teased skin. 
Your heart hikes again. 
"I'm sorry," he repeats. He pulls away, an agony. 
"It's okay," you say. Your breathlessness says otherwise.
Eddie takes as many deep breaths as he can stand, wanting to clear his head and filling it with you instead. Your everything; your smell, your skin. Your limp hands against his back. 
"I didn't hurt you, did I?" he asks when he gets a look at you, your unreadable expression. He takes care to keep his head angled down so you can't see the lower half of his face. 
"I don't think you could." 
You cup his cheek in your hand and he leans into it, his weight against yours.
"I wanted to tell you something," you confess. 
"What-" He licks his lips, wincing when his fangs slide into his tongue and scrape grooves across his taste buds. "What was that?" 
"I know you…" You pause, fingertips rubbing at his cheek.
Does she know? Eddie thinks, horrified. He hadn't realised how scary waiting could be. A thousand worries condensed into a handful of seconds. Does she know?
How could she not?
You press your palm to his cheek with more insistence. "I don't want you to think you have to hide anything from me. I know you have scars," you say, fingers sliding into the soft baby hair at the back of his neck. "You don't have to cover up. You don't have to cover any of it." 
"I won't hurt you," he says, trying to convince himself. 
"I know." 
-
You stay a while longer. Eddie's friends pretend that you hadn't been alone in the bathroom for an inordinate amount of time together. You thank them all silently and less so, trying to talk to as many of them as you can. 
There's Lucas, who's really, really nice, and his girlfriend Max, who's less so. She gives you an unimpressed look through her thick-lensed glasses, but you compliment her crutches and she comes around. 
There's Mike, who actually isn't anywhere as bad as Eddie had described him. He's not frosty or standoffish, he's sweet and he asks questions. There's a girl with him that you don't catch the name of, and a boy on her other side. 
There's Dustin, who you adore immediately, Robin, who you adore more, and then there's Steve. 
Steve offers you a pretzel like you're more than familiar. He strolls right up to you with a bowl of them in hand and doesn't leave until you've eaten half of them. 
There's a couple of people you don't manage to talk to at all, and you feel guilty about it all the way home. 
"What if they think I'm rude?" you ask, tired eyes locking onto the stereo system. The time blinks analog in the dark, 12:59AM. 
"They don't, don't worry about it. You have lots of time to get to know them, anyway." 
You hum and turn to his face, indulgent because you know he can't look back. "You're not too tired to drive, are you?" He's spent. Yesterday had been one of his bad days. 
"I'm fine." 
"You say that all the time," you observe, dropping your cheek into the passenger seat's headrest. 
"I'm fine all the time." 
"Liar." 
"Nuisance." 
You huff a laugh through your nose. The strands of his friendship bracelet, the small beads at the ends, swing like pendulums in the gap between his arm and the steering wheel. You can see the rough skin of a scar creeping out from under his sleeve. 
"Mike was really nice," you say. 
"He has a bleeding heart." 
That feels accurate. "He reminds me of you." 
Eddie rolls his eyes. You feel for every detail, the strange tension between you like a gaussian filter over everything. He's gorgeous in a horrific way, heartbreakingly pale, eyes dark as pitch, hands restless. They squeeze alone the wheel, thick fingers curling tight until his knuckles are stark white. Running down the back of his hands are veins like rivers. They're more purple than green. 
"Eddie," you say, playful, a tiny bit insecure. 
"What?" 
"Wanna stay the night?" 
His hand moves forward on the wheel like he's revving a motorcycle, the tendon in his wrist rising to the surface. He clenches. "Not sure it's a good idea." 
"Just to sleep. It's late." 
"I don't know if I can sleep next to you." 
You don't wanna say please. You don't want to ask Eddie to do anything he can't or doesn't wanna do. 
He pulls up outside of your house with his mind already made up. He gets out of the car and you follow his lead. He locks it, shoves the keys in his pocket as you join him on the path up to your porch. 
He's been in here enough times to know what it looks like, but for some reason you find yourself checking his face, worried about what it is he thinks of your things, all your mismatched trinkets, your stained glass lamps, your life as you let yourselves in. He ducks through the beeded curtain into your bedroom wary that they'll get tangled in his hair like they sometimes do. 
"Do you wanna call Wayne?" you ask, gesturing to your telephone on the right hand side, nestled between a stack of books and a cup full of coloured pencils. 
You pull your knee up to your chest and unlace your shoes one at a time. Eddie punches the number into the phone and holds the receiver to his shoulder to do as you're doing. It takes him less time to pop his sneakers off than for you to get out of yours. He's just taken the phone back into his hand when Wayne picks up. 
"Wayne?" he asks softly. "Didn't wake you up, did I?" 
You can't hear his response. 
"I'm gonna stay with Y/N tonight. Yeah, we had a good time. Yeah…" His eyes drift to you as you peel out of your thigh highs.
"Yeah, I'm still here. What?" He meets your eyes and it feels accidental, because he throws his eyes to your bedsheets and turns his face to the wall. "No," he says firmly. 
You scrape together something to wear for bed and some fresh underwear and leave for the bathroom, telling yourself that nothing is gonna happen so don't get your hopes up but not wanting to get caught out if it does. You freshen up, brushing your teeth and washing your face.
You stare at yourself in the mirror and wonder if you should've left your face-powder and your mascara on. Maybe even the skirt. You'd looked nice and pretty for the party. Now you look like yourself, still pretty but without those extra touches. Will he care? Does it matter? 
You debate your pyjama pants considerably. 
There's a lot happening. 
Eddie is… Eddie is something else. He's different, you'd known that for a long time, and his kiss had confirmed it. 
He's something out of a science fiction book. 
Well, nobody's perfect. 
Whatever he is, he'd kissed you. You'd kissed him and he'd responded, he'd come back for more, and now he's sitting in your bed when he could've gone home. You bring your hand to your neck and crane to one side, fingertips poking at your unbroken skin. His hickey's haven't even bruised. 
You screw the pants up and drop them into your laundry basket. You take off every piece of jewellery on your person. 
"Do you wanna use the bathroom?" you ask from behind the beaded curtain. "I left a new toothbrush for you on the sink." 
"Yeah, desperately, I…" He takes you in as you emerge. Fresh-faced, bare-legged. As naked as you've ever been in front of him, physically and otherwise. 
Eddie meets you where you're standing. He's ditched his jacket, and for the first time since you met him you can see the full length of his arms.
"You're not wearing your bracelets," he says, looking between your bodies. His hand twitches toward yours. 
"You have tattoos," you say. 
"They were better, before." 
There's a misshapen mess of black splodges near the crook of his elbow broken up by scar tissue. One arm is less scarred than the other, an almost perfect flank of white skin. 
"Is that a puppet? He's super spooky." 
"Mh-hm." 
You bring your hand to his tattoo and feel over the skin. It doesn't feel like it's there. Eddie holds your wrist and the two of you move together, your fingertips stroking up until you're wrapped around his bicep. 
Eddie brings his free hand to your collar. His index finger straightens, encouraging your chin up so he can ease forward and kiss you. He's firm, eager, and your lips curl up into a smile underneath it. He turns his head to the right and you fall left, smile worsened when you feel his own start to form. 
He nudges your nose. You take it for a telling off and laugh. "Sorry," you apologise, kissing his top lip. 
"You're making this difficult," he chides. 
Despite any sternness, Eddie loosens his grip on your wrists to slide his fingers between yours, pressing your joined hands to your chest. He leans back down and he's careful, almost methodical in the way he kisses. Chaste pecks, hot and precious as tiny stars. 
You reach for his waist. 
Eddie kisses you a final time and steps back. "I'll be back," he promises. 
You lower your chin, flustered and perplexed by his sudden departure.
Walking around to the right side of the bed, you click on your bedside lamp — a beautiful glass and foiled contraption that throws dainty stripes of stars and hearts over everything close in the dark — before climbing in. You sniff one of your pillows experimentally, trying to remember when you last changed the bed. You decide they're acceptable even if they really smell like your hair oil and flip them around to be safe, plumping them up with your hands.
You've curled up on your side and almost succumb to your fatigue when Eddie returns, bringing with him the smell of spearmint and a fuzzy feeling in your stomach as he shuts off the light and sits on the opposite side of the bed, facing you. The hair around his face is damp with water, baby hair's limp. 
"I'm sorry I don't have anything for you to wear, I-" Youre cut off by your own gasp as Eddie kisses you, his hand on your neck, his nose bridge sliding into your own. You hadn't been expecting it, and it's no less dizzying than any other kiss he's given you today. 
"It's okay," he murmurs lowly, lips pressed to your lips, "have to wear you, is all."  
You huff a laugh into his mouth. "I swear I'm always laughing when I'm with you," you muse as Eddie dedicates himself to your bottom lip. You cup the back of his head. "You're amazing." 
Eddie groans and eases back. "I'm not good with words, sweetheart. To tell you how I feel about you." 
You push one of your legs toward his knee. "...You can show me." 
He shifts in the bed until he can lean over the entirety of your chest, hands cupping your face and lips poised hovering over your own, a millimetre of space between your mouth and his. "Okay," he says quietly.
He dips down. You can feel his bottom lip tremble, and then he's kissing you too hard to feel it anymore. You wrap loose arms around his back. 
"Are you sure?" you whisper to him. 
He rests his nose against your cheek, eyes closed, drawing the tiniest left to right. "I want you," he reassures. 
"And you're okay?" 
"Yeah, sweetheart. I'm okay. Do you want to?" 
"Yeah. More than anything." 
Another loving kiss against your cheek, Eddie moves down, down, down. "Tell me if I do something you don't like," he murmurs, top lip dragging and leaving a line of dampness to the base of your throat. 
He adorns the canvas of your neck in half-moon contusions, big hands caressing your shoulders, your chest. You hold your breath as his fingers pass over your nipple, fighting to keep in any embarrassing sounds. 
Eddie disagrees with his plan of action. You shiver as he brings his lips to a close and his bottom teeth scrape upward, as he pulls his head up and says, "C'mon, angel, breathe." 
He follows his command with a manipulative touch, a circle over your nipple that makes you shudder. He kisses you and it feels like a thank you, pressure, a heat as his palm smooths over the bump of your tummy to your thighs. He squeezes the outside of one and for a while you can kiss him back, and then he pulls your thighs apart and you break away. Eddie follows, kisses you even when your reciprocation is weak. 
He pushes your thigh flat to the bed. 
You feel the heat of your excitement start to grow. Your stomach aches with the want to be touched. 
"You're like a space heater, you're that warm," Eddie says, hand coasting down the inside of your thigh. He squeezes until fat melds under his fingers. "Are you scared?" 
His whispering in your ear, his hand as close as it is to where you want it, it winds you up like a coil. You sigh as his thumb strokes the edge of your panties, sound coloured by an awful, devouring desire. 
His face presses further into yours in reaction. 
His touch is like the tide. He wades in, away. His thumb strokes inward over something soft and then his whole hand moves back to your thigh. 
"Teasing," you utter. 
"A little… Why, is there something you want me to do?" 
His clueless whispering is infuriating and exciting at the same time. Your heart races and you can't discern if it's more lust or love.
"Touch me," you plead, pouting, knowing he's a pushover.
Anticipation stabs like a needle in your tummy as he slides his palm over your cunt completely. He rubs a careful, almost casual rhythm into your panties with the breadth of his fingers, lips kissing a lazy stripe up to your forehead, where he rests his face. You both watch his hand move past the valley of your rising chest. 
"M'gonna pull these off, yeah?" He sits up, fingers pushing under the sides. "Lift your- yeah, thank you, sweetheart." 
You buzz with his pet names, his soft voice, the feeling of your panties sliding up to your knees and his gentle exhale. You swear you can feel it fan over your slit. "Shit…" he moan, pulling at your spread cunt. 
He looks like he's in pain, eyebrows pinched together and murmuring curses as he circles the wetness gathered at your entrance. You turn your head searchingly as he starts to ease his index finger inside your heat, a gentle probing. 
One becomes two. He muffles your sighing with firm kisses, amorous praises, "That's it, baby, relax," as he works you open, fingers wet with slickness but not enough. He changes his position, pushing his middle and marriage finger inside and curving as his thumb slides up your slit looking for the bead of your clit. 
Slow, slow circles. "There, huh?" 
You shiver as he pushes in deeper, fingers as far as they can go. He spreads them wide, drops reassuring kisses all over your face when you keen. It's so new to have him kiss you at all, and to have him touching you — you're melting into nothing right there in his hold. 
"I got you. Tell me if it hurts, okay?" 
"Want you to- I want you to fuck me," you murmur, arms wrapping around him so you can hide your face in his neck. 
"Fuck. Fuck, baby. Gonna fuck you just as soon as I can fit," he murmurs back, sinking three of his thick fingers into your snug cunt. He pulls wetness out with every thrust, a line of slick dribbling down onto the sheets underneath. He wipes it upward and pushes it back inside, his chest heaving. "Y'so tight, gotta take my time. Take our time." He rubs his nose against your head until he can kiss the highest point of your cheek. "Make sure you can take it." 
"I can." 
It doesn't bear repeating how quietly you're speaking, a mouthing inaudible under the wet, rhythmic thud of Eddie's pinky finger slapping your sticky cunt as he ups the pace of his finger-fucking. 
"I don't think so," he coos, pulling his fingers from your cunt and making a show of spreading them wide. Your slick ribbons between them, almost invisible in the dark. "Ruin your sheets before any of that, maybe." 
Eddie sits up and gets his hands under your armpits. You laugh as he tugs you up so your shoulders are on top of the pillows, but you don't have time to be confused. He quickly moves to kneel at your feet and pulls your leg over his shoulder, your back lifting unevenly from the sheets. 
He starts with a sweet kiss pressed to the skin closest to his mouth, your lower thigh, and then works his way up, open mouthed, barely kisses at all until his hair whispers against your sensitive cunt and he's nipping at the stripe of skin between your thigh and the place where you most want his attention. 
"Pretty," he says into your damp skin, lips shining. You reach down to stroke his hair behind his ears, worried he's gonna get it dirty. 
He looks at you from between your thighs, his eyes dark in the dim light, their lashes long and soft where the outermost flutter into your skin. He's lovely. 
He holds your gaze as he pulls back to your inner thigh. "Pretty everywhere," he says salaciously. 
His lips part over your skin and you think he might bite you, a bruising hickey, but he pushes you down flat to the bed by your hips and kisses your clit, a simple kiss. Your fingers weave deeper into his hair. Your fingernails scratch lightly against his scalp, every tiny lick or kiss reflected in the minute tightening of your hands. 
He goes slow, mouths down, kisses wetter and wetter as he reaches your entrance. "Poor girl," he murmurs, hands pulled down to further scandalise. He sinks two fingers inside and laughs into your cunt. You squirm. 
"What happened? You're dripping on my fingers." Your thighs draw closed around his head as he curls his fingers against a soft spot.
"Eddie, can you-" You swallow. "Please. Please." 
He pries your thighs open and rubs them soothingly, lapping at the heat of your cunt in face of your pleading. His tongue appears broad and flat up the centre of you until he's kissing on your clit, fingers pumping in rhythm. Your fingers work into his hair and he groans, the vibration enough to make you whimper under his mouth. 
He laps at your clit messily and you tip your head back, breath coming in tight pants. You don't know what you say, only how you say it, desperate "please,"s and keening "Eddie,"s. 
His thrusts grow in enthusiasm, fingers rubbing eagerly against something sweet. You pull your legs up and nudge his face to your cunt insistently, thigh shaking as you hold it up. Eddie doesn't need any more encouragement, his pretty pink lips suckling at your clit until you see stars. You make a pained little sound and try to move away from his kissing, startled at the intensity of your high. 
Eddie lets your clit pop out of his mouth with a lewd, slick sound, his hands moving under your thighs and pulling you closer. "Good girl," he says, rubbing his wet face against the inside of your thigh. He inhales hard as you are, though he pauses to kiss your kneecap and pat your leg. "Good girl, sweetheart." 
"I'm sorry," you say breathlessly, hands pulling his hair from his face. Pleasure rolls through you in hot waves. 
"For what?" 
"Tugging on your hair," you explain, shoulder pulled up to your cheek.  
Eddie kisses your tummy lovingly and climbs on top of you to do the same just under your chin. "It’s okay, sweetheart, I like that shit. That was good, huh?" he asks, lips dropping down to yours all wet and warm. 
He's not bragging, he's genuinely asking. 
You nod into his kiss, your hands coming up to his sides. You swear your ears perk up as he unzips his jeans and eases them down, a hand disappearing into the mess of fabric. He moans quietly at the first touch. 
You move his hair out of the way to watch. Eddie tugs at the length of his cock with a cruel hand, a short dribble of pearly precum sobbing down the tip and under his fingers. He spreads it as it goes, the slickness emphasising the ridges and veins of his cock. You can see it throb, if you look close enough. 
He sits back and eases his jeans and boxers down enough to reveal a thatch of curls that brush his hand with every pump downward. 
"You okay?" he asks, smirking. 
You pull your shirt over your head and your chest warms at his adoring smile. "Will you take off yours?"
He doesn't hesitate like you worried he might. He sheds his t-shirt, pulling the fabric over the back of his head and dumping it off the side of the bed. 
You take in his chest and it's abundance of ragged scarring still purpled with newness. He has a tattoo over his heart, a black whorl of legs and eyes. Fine dark hair crawls from the middle of his chest down his navel, joining with the thatch of coiled hair surrounding his aching cock. You shuffle forward and wait with two tentative hands held aloft until he says, "It's okay," before you touch him. You run your hands down the soft slopes of his waist. 
"Does it hurt?" 
"Not anymore." 
"Can I kiss it?" 
He snorts. "Prefer you kiss something else." 
That really makes you laugh. You dot a kiss against his jaw and can't make yourself stop, dropping them all the way to the skin behind his ear. Your hand creeps lower as you go, held to the curve of his tummy. His skin is hot to touch the lower you go, and his stomach feels solid, a heaviness you know all too well. 
"Can I touch you?" you whisper into his ear. 
"Please." 
You drop your forehead against his chest and he brings his hand up to cup the back of your head. His cock pulses as you wrap your hand around it, skin smooth and slick as you palm slowly up and down. You watch in awe as a bead of precum wells at the tip, Eddie's rough breathing loud overhead. 
"Lie down, Y/N," he says, hand moving behind your naked shoulders. 
"What way?" 
"How do you want it, sweetheart? We'll do it whatever way you want." 
You think about it. Whatever way you want. No matter how indulgent, you know he means it.
"Will you spoon me?" 
He pushes you gently and follows behind, dragging your body into his front and angling your hips, cock hot and prodding your back. He gets his hand under your knee and pulls it up, splaying your cunt. You jump in surprise as he pushes his cock through your folds, tip rubbing against the still sensitive bead of your clit. 
Eddie wraps his arms around you, hugging you from behind. "You wanna put it in for me, baby?" 
You reach between your bodies and take his sticky cock into your hand, shifting until the head nudges against your hole. He sinks in inch by inch, arms tightening around your waist and grinding you down onto his cock until you're whimpering. 
You grab at his arms with your hands and tether yourself to him as he starts to rock his hips, his thrusting tender and his face turned into your neck. 
He presses his hand flat to your abdomen, an anchoring point as he moulds your weepy cunt around his length, each slovenly movement into your heat spreading you that little bit wider. 
"Fuck," he says finally, sounding seconds from a black out. "Oh, fuck- You're tight. Gonna fuck you open slow, okay?" 
You're pretty sure you'd let him do just about anything. You bring his hand to your mouth and kiss every white knuckle, every freckle you can see on the back, and when he bottoms out your cover your lips with his stolen hand to smother a tearful gasp.
Eddie's thrusts are spearing in their steady rhythm, a dirty slap ringing with every punching thrust forward. You curl in on yourself and hide your mouth in the sheets, wet pants smothered by fabric. Eddie's grip falls to your hip, where he pulls your body back and forces your cunt open even deeper. 
His cock pushes into your sweet spot sudden and emphatic. You moan and he stills, rutting into that same space without pulling out until you're babbling his name, body knocked forward with every thrust. 
Eddie turns your face toward him as much as he can without hurting your neck, your moans echoing in time with each thrust. "There you go," he says, "wanna hear how good it feels." 
If he cares that you can't answer him he doesn't show it, arm coming up under you arm to grasp at your chest, your breaststroke soft and aching under his hand as he squeezes tenderly. His cock kisses at the sweet spot inside you intermittently; you're dizzy with it. 
Eddie can't keep quiet either, his moans breathy, his breath hissing between his teeth when you clamp down around him. "Fuck," he begs, dragging his cock out of your heat, "fuck, Y/N." 
He says your name like the syllables alone are appraising. 
You can tell when it gets too much for him. He slows. His face drops into your shoulder, and he matches his pace to the wet kisses he leaves behind. Your wetness feels stickying, each of his thrusts snug. 
His breath hitches, ragged pants accompanying every slow push of his hips. "Where's my girl?" he asks, eyes still closed as his hand abandons where it'd been squeezing the bump of your tummy to search further downward, fingers disappearing into your folds, short curls wet with slick. He can't find any purchase. You roll your hips, chase his touch and the pleasure that comes with it. 
He groans into your shoulder. It sounds more pain than pleasure. 
"Are you okay?" you ask, trying to turn in his arms. He holds you in place. "Eddie?" 
"Yeah, fuck, I'm okay." He grinds up into your cunt. "Fuck, you're perfect." 
"Will you kiss me?" 
He does. It's nowhere near the bruising press you'd wanted. It's too careful. 
"Listen," he murmurs, "I'm gonna get you on your front, okay? Gonna make you feel so good," he promises, waiting for you to nod before he pushes your shoulder away from him and climbs up behind you. You lay flat on your stomach and Eddie settles on your thighs, a heavy weight. 
He pushes into your cunt with two fingers first, the new position allowing for a new pleasure. He pumps in and out and swaps his fingers for his cock quickly after, bearing the full weight of his body into your back as sinks to the hilt. 
You both moan in time, hands fisted in the sheets. 
He kisses your neck, lips parted, and his teeth feel so sharp that your heart sinks as it had in the bathroom. 
"Eddie-" you start. 
He pulls away, stops every movement. 
"Eddie," you say again. What are you supposed to say? You both know what he is. 
There's a lull where neither of you knows what to do filled by your too-fast breathing.
"I won't hurt you," he says, hands rubbing up the length of your back and then under. He holds a hand over your heart. He drops his lips to your back. "Do you want me to stop?" 
He must feel your pulse calm under his touch, but he still asks again when you don't answer. "Do you want me to stop? It's okay if you do. You're okay, baby, I promise." 
You steal a pillow from against the headboard and rise up on elbows. Your admission comes weak but completely honest. "Fuck me, Eddie, please... I want you. I want you-" Your murmuring's interrupted by a sharp breath as Eddie starts to move again, the head of his cock pushing into your cunt, a slick, perfect feeling. 
He moans from the back of his throat as his cock pushes into you again and again, hips smacking the dough of your ass as his pace quickens. You hug your pillow tightly, tears popping up in the corners as he ruts deep. 
"Being so good for me," he groans, clamped down on your hip with a vice-like grip. "Fuck, you feel so good. Fucking clinging to me every time I pull out, baby, Christ." His blasphemy is punctuated by a thrust that has you sliding up the bed, sheets wrinkling under your arms. You spread your thighs and wetness pools at your clit as his pelvis thrusts into you, driving pleasure so deeply it aches in your hips.
You moan pathetically and reach back to hold his hand, wiggling your fingers. He takes it in one and presses your arm against your lower back with the other, struggling to maintain a steady pace as he gets close to cumming. You're a babbling stream of sounds as he fucks in deep, swollen sweet spot tapped against mercilessly.
He throws himself back on his haunches, cock dragged out of your heat. 
You pull your legs out from underneath him and curl onto your side to watch, eyes wide as white spurts of pearlescence jump out of the head of his reddened cock and drip down the bumps of his fingers. He leans back, his stomach and thighs tensed with every pump. 
He groans through a smile, moan's coloured by a happy, relieved laughter. "F-uck," he drags, fisting his cock dry. 
He meets your eyes as the last of it slides down onto his stomach. 
You smile softly. "Fuck," you mumble. 
Eddie wipes his hand in his jeans like a fucking hooligan and tucks his cock back into his boxers with a wince, and then he collapses on top of you. He's sort of nice about it, his arm over your shoulder and his face behind your ear. 
"Fucking beautiful," he praises, dropping his head back on the bed so you're face to face. "You're so fucking pretty. So perfect." He kisses you. "You're perfect," he repeats, staring intently into your eyes. 
You pull a hand from between your legs, smelling of sex. Eddie literally couldn't care less if he tried, and he lets you take his face into your hand without complaint. 
He gets his arm under your arm and starts to rub your back. "You want me to take care of you again?" he asks, eyebrows raised gently. "Yeah?" 
And you would let him, you would, but you need to see them for yourself. 
You touch your index fingertip to his lip. 
"Can I see?" you ask. 
He loses his boisterous joy, tamps it down. He realises that he can't lie, that he hasn't been lying, and he nods. You tremble as you pull his lip up over his canine tooth, excited and scared.
A sharp, exceptionally white tooth pokes out of Eddie's gums. You're taken aback, though you'd known exactly what you'd find.
A fang. 
Blood oozes at the gums. 
"You're bleeding," you worry aloud, touching your finger to the dark beading at the base of his tooth. 
Eddie's eyes rove over your face thoughtfully. He pulls your hand away from his lip and sets it on his neck instead. "They always do that. The gum heals, breaks when they wanna come out." 
"How often do they come out?" 
"A lot more since I met you. Whenever my adrenaline spikes, they seem to think it's… feeding time." 
That is a dizzying thing to learn. 
You're not sure how you feel, but you know one thing: he's Eddie. "It's too bad," you say, forcing a lightness that turns real more easily than you expect. "I really want to kiss you right now." 
He strokes your cheek with his thumb. "I really wanna kiss you too. Maybe a small one?" 
You find yourself leaning forward, unafraid. 
He kisses you once, twice, three times, the two of you holding each other's faces and covered in mess. Slick and sweat and blood. The hearts and stars from your lamp spray over his hip and paint him with pinks, greens, oranges, a rainbow cutting over his trim waist. You rest your hand overtop, feel his keloid scars like hills under your fingers. 
"My boyfriend's a vampire," you mutter, bemused at fate.
Eddie blinks at you. "I'm your boyfriend?" 
"Yeah, I think so. Don't you?" 
Eddie pulls you into his chest and doesn't let you go for a long, long time.
-
Your first time watching a blood sate is weird. 
For one, Chief Hopper is firmly against it. He's got his kid with him, the boy from the party that Mike had been so heavily doting on, and if he didn't you might think he was a pretty scary guy. 
"I think this is stupid," the chief says plainly. "I think this is stupid, I think you're stupid," — he points at Eddie where he's sitting sickly in the round couch — "and I think you're plain crazy, kid." He points at you last. 
You beam at him. "People have said that about me." 
His kid laughs. 
"Will," Hopper says tiredly, "go sit in the car." 
"Look, Chief, I know I messed up, okay, but she kind of stuck her hand in my mouth and I didn't really have a choice." 
Wayne looks at you with new eyes. "You did?" 
You nod at him faux-seriously. 
"And what gave her the inkling that you might have had something in your mouth worth looking at?" Hopper says, which is hilarious. You laugh behind your hand. 
He gives you a disapproving look that you completely ignore. If you'd taken notice of disapproval you would've stopped having this much fun years ago. 
"Uh, well, she might have… felt them?" His pitch rises. 
Hopper looks like he's about to blow a gasket when Will says, "What was he supposed to do? Never talk to anyone new ever again?" 
"He did a lot more than just talk to me," you say. There'd been a fixed bike, phone calls, lots of sandwiches, bug hunts, an entire sketchbook full of drawings. 
"I told you to wait in the car," Hopper says.
Will grins and raises his hands in surrender. "Bye," he mouths. You wave. 
Hopper waits for the door to close before he continues. "I get it, when you're a teenager you think your hormones are the end of the world-" 
"I'm almost twenty three." 
Hopper pinches his hand closed. "But you do not understand the danger that you are creating here."
"Like a stake-ing," you whisper, very very quietly. Eddie's the only one who can hear you, and he laughs so hard he snorts. 
"I'm glad you find this funny." Hopper's tone could not imply the opposite any more. 
He hands Wayne a paper bag that audibly sloshes and stalks out, his anger a palpable cloud of steam rising off of his shoulders. Eddie seizes up beside you at the sound, lips parting as his fangs come through. You don't touch him because you value your blood inside your body, only slide away from him and smile. "You okay, handsome?" 
"Kid, maybe the chief is right. We don't know how Eds is gonna act with you here," Wayne says. 
You nod respectfully. You like Wayne, and he knows about all of this stuff more than you ever could. 
"No," Eddie mumbles, putting his hand out for you across the couch. 
You take it without thinking. 
Wayne sighs. You can hear him grumbling as he disappears from view into the kitchen and puts a pot on the stove. There's the sound of a bag being punctured with a knife, a wet slosh. Eddie's grip on your hand tightens. 
You're still fascinated that he even drinks blood in the first place. That's wickedly sickening. Wicked, because it's cool that he's a vampire, with his impressive hearing, senses and smell. But sickening, because if you had to drink a pint of blood every couple of weeks you'd throw up. 
"I read about a new blood-sucker." 
Eddie raises his heavy head. "Another bug?" 
"No, a finch! A vampire finch. They're really pretty, Teddy. They're small and brown with long beaks and they drink blood because there's barely any water on their island." You give him a loving smile. "They aren't parasites. S'just how they had to change to survive." 
He squeezes your hand, this time on purpose. 
"Are you gonna come and have it in here, Eddie?" Wayne asks, one last shot at separating the two of you.
"I'm okay," he says loudly. His eyes trace your smile. "Really." 
It can't be fun to have two people watch you drink a warm mug of blood, but Eddie finds it funny. He keeps laughing every time he brings the rim of the glass to his mouth. 
"I can't do it if you're looking at me," he says. 
Wayne rolls his eyes and looks away. You cover your face with both hands and part your fingers to spy on him through the gaps. He makes it look easy, draining the mug basically in one long pull, though his hunger turns violent as the cup empties. He chokes. Blood trickles down from one corner of his mouth. 
You automatically want to reach over and wipe it away. Wayne grabs your arm before you can and gives you a fatherly look that says, I wouldn't do that if I were you. 
"Shit," Eddie says, slamming his now empty mug down on the coffee table. It makes a grating sound like a ground mortar and pestle. He sits as far back on the couch cushions as he can, nausea clear on his face. 
"Deep breath," Wayne says. 
"Fuck, Wayne." 
"You're aces. Deep breaths." 
Your heart hurts watching Eddie like this. He covers his mouth with eyes closed tightly and breathes hard through his nose. Already there's colour coming back into his face, not a lot but anything is an improvement. He'd been practically grey. 
When Eddie pulls his hand from his mouth blood has spread over his lips and jaw. Your eyes widen.
"I'll get the shower running," Wayne says, slapping his knees as he stands. He stops before the hallway. "Good job, Eddie." 
The boy in question slouches into a ball on the sofa and nods into a cushion. You wait for the sound of Wayne pulling the shower cord that turns on the hot water before you stand up, head tipped to one side. 
"You okay, handsome?".
"Tired." 
"You want a hug from me?" 
"Is anyone else offering?" He opens one eye to peek at you and grins at your distraught expression. "I'm joking, I'm kidding. C'mere, before I start bawling." You sit and then flop onto your side, pulling your legs up next to his. "Such a frowny face." His voice is adorably tired.
"Better than yours. You look like someone from Night of the Living Dead, baby." 
Eddie's arm lies limp like a dead fish over your waist. "Lemme nibble on your brains," he says, words thick as dark honey, eyes closed. "Just a snack." 
You're waiting for someone to pull the rug out from under your feet. No way your boyfriend, your cries at the end of every movie, brings you flowers because he felt like it, won't step on cracks in the sidewalk boyfriend just skulled a glass of O-negative like it was a milkshake. 
You feel guilty as soon as you think about it. He's not confined to all his softest parts and he never will be. He's snarky and angry and loud. He plays guitar like a real rockstar and he doesn't take anyone's shit. He's a survivor. A glass of blood every now and then was never gonna stop him. 
You keep wondering if you should let him suck your blood. It could be hot. It could also probably be the worst idea ever, a relationship faux pas up there with proposing after a month or saying I love you on the first date. 
"What are you thinking about?" he asks. 
You brush the hair out of his eyes with your ring finger. "Embarrassing relationship fumbles." 
"Oh yeah? Like letting your girlfriend watch you drink human blood from a mug shaped like Woodstock?" 
"Least it wasn't Snoopy." 
"God forbid." 
"Is it always like this?" You stroke your hand down his face and rub along his jaw with your thumb. "D'you always get sleepy?" 
"Yeah." He turns his face so your hand covers his mouth. 
You've stopped wearing silver jewellery, your wrists bare besides the endearingly awful friendship bracelet he's constructed for you. Not a friendship bracelet, he'd corrected. You're not kissing other friends, are you? Because that's really gonna put a downer on this whole thing.  
You dip your forehead to his chin and the two of you lay there in silence. You can smell blood, a thick, metallic stick permeating every corner of the room. It's especially strong between the both of you. 
"Do you wanna bite me right now?" you inquire without opening your eyes. 
"Not really. Blood sate kicks in quickly. It's the worst for, like, the first ten seconds after. Now I wanna sleep, but Wayne's gonna make me shower." 
"Maybe I can shower with you." 
"I'm sure he'd jump for joy if you suggest it." 
"Really?"
Eddie kisses your hand. "No," he says with a giddy laugh. 
"I'll pretend I'm gonna sit on the toilet. Keep watch." 
"How will you stop your hair from getting wet?" 
"I'll lean out." 
Eddie laughs even more than he had been, peeling laughter that warms you from the inside out as he kisses your hand again. "That'll definitely work." 
Wayne clears his throat. 
"Shower's hot. I'm going out. For an hour." Eddie perks up. His uncle looks him dead in the eye. "Don't make me regret this." 
And while Wayne had been under the impression you and Eddie were gonna have some grown up fun together in the shower, what you really do is an innocent act of affection: you wash Eddie's hair. 
"You have to lean your head back," you chide. 
"I am." 
"More than that." 
"There's no room." 
You're lucky you both fit. You're freezing standing behind Eddie, the only relief the warm water that trickles down from your hands to your elbows as you draw circles in his scalp, working the shampoo into a fine lather. 
"How did you get blood here?" you ask, scratching rusty flakes from the hair behind his ear. 
"I don't know. It gets everywhere. Like eyeshadow." 
You push your chin over his shoulder. "You wear eyeshadow?" 
"For shows." 
"Really?"
"Is it hard to believe?" 
You encourage his head under the water and rake your hands through his curls, encouraging the soapy water down to the ends with patient hands. "Lip gloss too? Hey, can I do your makeup?" 
"Maybe tomorrow," he bargains. While the shower has helped to wake him up, lethargy remains thick and unshakeable as adamant. 
You kiss the wet ridge of his shoulder blade, picturing his pretty face decked out in dark liners and sticky balm. "Thank you." 
"I haven't worn any in a long time. Haven't played a show in a really long time." 
You wring the water out of his hair and search in the steam for his conditioner. It's mostly empty. "You could put on a show for me. I never got to see you play," you say, shaking it really hard. A dollop collects in your hand and you work the dregs through the ends of his long hair. 
"You want that?" 
"I think you're the best guitar player in the world." 
You're not joking. He's the best, and he plays guitar. And he's pretty good, semantics aside. You love sitting out on the porch with him and listening to him play old rock songs off the top of his head. You could watch his hands move over the strings for hours. 
"If that's the case, I can definitely put on a show. Make-up, costume, stage dives. The whole nine yards. Anything for my girl." 
You roll the ends of his hair between two coated palms and step back. "There. You have to let it soak in for a couple of minutes." 
Eddie turns with a grin, angling his chest and hair forward, away from the stream. 
"Whatever will we do?"
You wipe an escaped streak of blood off of his bottom lip and smile. "I have no idea." 
You kiss. Eddie leans down and you move up, damp noses glancing off of each other. You're used to short kisses, never enough to make his heart race in case it prompts an unnecessary appearance of his fangs, so when Eddie encourages your lips apart to wade in deeper you pull back questioningly. 
"Blood sate. I'm 'sated'. They won't come out." 
Your jaw drops. "For real?" 
He shakes his head with a pleased smile. "For real. Kiss me sick, sweetheart." 
You throw your arm around his neck and drag his face to yours, kissing with an ardency that both surprises and amuses him. He laughs into your open mouth until suddenly he's not laughing at all, only breathing, pushing against you with the same urgent force and the same adoring smile. 
"Does this mean you can give me a hickey?" you ask enthusiastically. Eddie has yet to give you a proper love bite.
He leans back under the show spray and pulls you in with him, laughing when you dissolve like rice paper in his arms, finally warm. There's never been a sweeter sound. 
/\^._.^/\
thank you for reading! | my masterlist | my halloween party
if you enjoyed reading his, please consider reblogging. i promise it makes a huge difference
10K notes · View notes
steddiealltheway · 6 months
Text
Steve can see it in Max. That same loneliness and ache that he finds in himself. For him, it’s result of his parents leaving with no intent to return to him unless absolutely necessary.
He knows he was an accident. Or rather a mistake as his father used to call him when he was particularly angry. But it made sense to him. Steve's the reason his father had to marry his mother. He left him "trapped." And maybe no one says it out loud, but he can tell his mother feels the same way too.
But they must keep up appearances, right?
Which is what Max has been trying to do since Billy died, El moved away, and it's been just her and her mom. But she's been going about it through a different route - pushing people away all while pretending things are fine. But Steve sees the way she picks up the broken pieces of her mom and tries to put them back together - Steve's had to do the same thing before.
So, he starts sticking around a little longer. Offering her more rides to the arcade and around town to pick up groceries when she needs to. Sometimes he'll tell her about a new recipe he's been trying for a casserole and pick up the ingredients, pretending like the milk and butter he bought will spoil by the time he drives home from her trailer.
Of course, they both know it's a lie, but Max humors him and plays along. She'll let him cook dinner while she picks up the bottles her mom left on the floor, dumps out the overflowing ashtray, and feeds the dog. Usually, Steve will ask her what she's learning in school and linger a little longer than usual in hopes that she'll say more than the usual, "I don't know. A bunch of boring stuff."
But lingering has gotten a lot of things out of Max such as her love for Kate Bush, a story about El and how much she misses her, and short quips about Lucas before she gets a sad smile on her face. Steve doesn't really know what to say most of the time, but he hopes that just being there will help.
Unfortunately, lingering and just being there has led him to his current predicament of none other than Eddie "The Freak" Munson sitting on the hood of his car glaring at him as he walks out of Max's place. Steve jumps a little, startled by the figure on his car and becoming more hostile as he sees the expression on his face. He shoves his hands in his pockets and slows his pace. "Is there a problem?"
Eddie snorts humorlessly. "Christ. You're really going to pretend like there's nothing wrong with what's happening?"
Steve's brows furrow, entirely missing whatever point he's trying to make.
Eddie stands up and stalks toward him. "I see you, you know. Always lurking around when her mom isn't home. Coming out of her trailer late at night."
Steve laughs, finally understanding the absurd conclusion he's come to. "Jesus, man. You're delusional."
Steve doesn't expect it, but Eddie sharply shoves his chest and grits, "I don't fucking lie to me, Harrington."
Steve holds his hands up. "I'm not," he firmly states. "Nothing like that is happening here. I'm glad you're looking out for her, but it isn't like that."
"Do you expect me to believe that? Maybe this is why you're always hanging around Henderson and the other kids."
Steve crosses his arms and his jaw tenses. "I'm not a fucking pervert or a pedophile if that's what you're trying to say. I'm just looking after them."
"Why?" Eddie asks, dramatically opening his arms, "Why would King Steve adopt a group of misfits to take under his wing? See, the math isn't adding up."
Usually, Steve would just brush it off and tell the person to fuck off and mind their own business. But his parents have just left town again without leaving a note and Max had snapped when Steve tried to help her clean the place because it looked worse than usual, and he was just generally feeling like shit and angry at his parents and Max's parents for not being there. So he broke, "Because I don't want Max to end up like me! I don't want any of those kids to grow up without a role model. And god forbid if any of those other kids' parents fuck up, and they’re left with only me. I need them to know that I'm there for them! Because sometimes it feels like whenever the world goes to shit, I'm the only one who is there, and I plan to stay there, okay?!"
He finishes his rant breathing a little heavier than usual and noticing that a few of the lights in the trailers have turned on around them. He looks around and awkwardly nods to the people glaring out their windows. God, he needs to get a grip.
When he turns back to Eddie, he notices the conflicted expression, jaw dropped, eyebrows knitted together, eyes searching him as if he's still wondering if he's lying.
A door creaks open behind them and Steve curses under his breath as he hears Max say, "Eddie, leave him alone. Do you really think I would hook up with my damn babysitter? Jeez."
"Language," Steve quietly lectures as the door swings shut. He runs his hands over his face and takes a deep breath. It's been a long fucking day.
A hand lands on his arm and tugs him away from Max's trailer. Steve glances up at Eddie, leading him across the way. "Where are we going?"
"My place," Eddie says.
"Why?"
"So we can talk."
God, the last thing he wants to do is talk to Eddie of all people, the guy he's been actively avoiding since Dustin started worshipping the ground - or rather tables - he walks on. But he lets himself be pulled away in the trailer and practically deposited on the couch in the living room.
He glances up and comments, "That's a lot of mugs."
"My uncle's, but that's not what I wanted to... Christ," Eddie says, pacing in front of Steve and tugging his hair in front of his face. The anxious display makes Steve feel even more tired, but he lets him pace. God, what is he even doing here?
"I'm sorry," Eddie blurts out. "I'm just..." he trails off and rushes over to grab a stool a few feet away before dragging it in front of the couch. He sits on it but his leg still holds that nervous energy as it rapidly bounces up and down. "I jumped to conclusions, and it was really shitty of me, man. I just... didn't believe what Henderson was saying about you and thought 'Oh, this makes way more sense than Steve Harrington being a good dude.' And I'm sorry to accuse you of that. And I... I didn't know about your... parents and stuff. Like I knew they were away a lot because of your parties but... I just never connected the dots. And I'm sorry. No one deserves that shit, man."
Steve doesn't know what to do this whole interaction, especially with it coming from Eddie Munson who he doesn't think he's ever talked to before this moment, but... he needs to hear it. God, he needs to hear it.
Of course, he can't let him know this, so he does what he's best at and brushes it off. "It's fine. You were just looking out for the kids. And really just ignore what I said back there, it isn't that big of a deal."
Eddie worries his bottom lip before he blurts out, "I know what it's like." He pauses and takes a deep breath. "I mean, I know what it's like to have... absent parents. But in my case, eventually, my uncle Wayne took me in, and I can only imagine if he didn't." He gives him a pointed look and lowers his voice, "Do you have someone like that?"
A big part of Steve wants to leave right now, and he knows there's nothing stopping him. But a bigger part of him needs to stay. Needs to talk about the emptiness in his house that he can never truly escape at the end of the day that he can’t talk to anyone about. Because he's not supposed to be weak. He's supposed to take care of the others. So he admits, "No, I don't have... anyone like that. Except Robin but..."
"That's different," Eddie finishes the thought for him.
Steve nods. He loves Robin, but he loves her as a platonic soulmate and not as a parent figure in his life. "You know, I once had this basketball coach in middle school - Mr. Weston. And I remember looking up to him so much. I wanted to be just like him, and I would go to his office during lunch and ask him for advice or talk about dumb shit that my father would never talk about. But he never shamed me for my questions. And sometimes he even packed an extra dessert for me." Steve smiles at the memories and runs a hand through his hair, remembering the day he got the news. "But one time, when I went to his office, he had this look on his face. And I just knew it was bad news. And really, it wasn't bad news to him because his wife was pregnant. But she wanted to move a few states away to raise the kid closer to her family. And it wasn't his fault, you know? It wasn't like he purposely chose to move away from me, but I felt like I was abandoned again."
Steve wipes a tear from his eye and puts his head in his hands. "God, I don't know why I'm even telling you this story. Sorry."
"Don't apologize," Eddie says quickly. He pauses and shifts on the stool, his gaze being far away. "I remember him. He was one of the only gym teachers that defended me against all the shitty middle school bullies. He was a good person.”
Steve nods. God, he was a good person.
Eddie continues, “I'm sorry that he left. And I bet he still regrets leaving you behind."
Steve leans back against the couch and looks away, shaking his head. "I bet he forgot about me."
"You're kind of hard to forget."
Steve looks at Eddie and sees a slight blush on his cheeks as he shakes his head and waves his hands as if trying to make the comment go away. "What I mean is that there's no way he's forgotten about you. Someone who you used to have lunch with all the time to the point of giving you free food... Nah, man. He remembers you. I think you may have been as important to him as he was to you."
The thought breaks away at a wall Steve had built up long ago. "Thanks," he practically whispers.
Eddie just smiles at him, small dimples appearing on his cheeks.
"You didn't deserve it either, you know," Steve says. "The absent parent stuff. Even with Wayne, they should've been here too."
Eddie's smile falters a bit as he swallows and looks at the ground. "Thanks," he mumbles. He looks up at Steve and comments, "Getting sappy with Steve Harrington. Who knew."
"Yeah, getting sappy with Eddie Munson," Steve echoes back at him.
Eddie laughs, "I'm surprised you even know my name."
"You're kind of hard to forget," Steve says easily.
That same blush comes back to Eddie who shifts in his chair a bit as if he needs to process the information with his whole body.
They sit in the moment for a bit before Eddie gets a somewhat serious look on his face and offers, "You know, I'm definitely not a parent figure or anything, but I'm always here and around to talk about that whole thing if you need to."
Steve's heart beats a little faster at the sheer genuineness. "Same here," he can't help but offer in return. He glances down at his watch and sighs, "It's getting late, so I better..."
"Right," Eddie says, standing up and leading him to the door. "Do you need water for the road or anything?"
Steve smiles and pats him on the back without thinking too hard about it. "I'm good, man. But thank you. For everything really."
"Sorry for being an asshole," Eddie apologizes again.
"Usually that's my line," Steve accidentally voices before cringing a bit, wondering further why Eddie's been so kind to him.
But as he opens the door, Eddie comments, "I don't know. It seems like Dustin was right about the whole reformed jock thing. Maybe your crown really has fallen - which is a good thing by the way."
Steve slightly smiles at him before he turns to leave. But he can't help but say, "I wonder what the neighbors will think about me leaving your trailer so late."
Eddie groans then laughs. "Sorry to ruin your image."
"I wouldn't mind," Steve replies, honestly unsure what he means by that. "Goodnight, Eddie."
"Goodnight, Steve," Eddie says, that same blush on his cheeks, only this time Steve isn't sure if it's something he said or a result of the cold night air.
In bed that night, Steve feels a slight weight lifted from him and can't help but feel like he’s a little less alone.
2K notes · View notes
lackadaisycats · 2 months
Note
Hey Tracy! Have you heard about the new Ai called Sora? Apparently it can now create 2D and 3D animations as well as hyper realistic videos. I’ve been getting into animation and trying to improve my art for years since I was 7, but now seeing that anyone can create animation/works in just a mare seconds by typing in a couple words, it’s such a huge slap in the face to people who actually put the time and effort into their works and it’s so discouraging! And it has me worried about what’s going to happen next for artists and many others, as-well. There’s already generated voices, generated works stolen from actual artists, generated music, and now this! It’s just so scary that it’s coming this far. 
Yeah, I've seen it. And yeah, it feels like the universe has taken on a 'fuck you in particular' attitude toward artists the past few years. A lot of damage has already been done, and there are plenty of reasons for concern, but bear in mind that we don't know how this will play out yet. Be astute, be justifiably angry, but don't let despair take over. --------
One would expect that the promo clips that have been dropping lately represent some of the best of the best-looking stuff they've been able to produce. And it's only good-looking on an extremely superficial level. It's still riddled with problems if you spend even a moment observing. And I rather suspect, prior to a whole lot of frustrated iteration, most prompts are still going to get you camera-sickness inducing, wibbly-wobbly nonsense with a side of body horror.
Will the tech ultimately get 'smarter' than that and address the array of typical AI giveaways? Maybe. Probably, even. Does that mean it'll be viable in quite the way it's being marketed, more or less as a human-replacer? Well…
A lot of this is hype, and hype is meant to drive up the perceived value of the tech. Executives will rush to be early adopters without a lot of due diligence or forethought because grabbing it first like a dazzled chimp and holding up like a prize ape-rock makes them look like bleeding-edge tech geniuses in their particular ecosystem. They do this because, in turn, that perceived value may make their company profile and valuations go up too, which makes shareholders short-term happy (the only kind of happy they know). The problem is how much actual functional value will it have? And how long does it last? Much of it is the same routine we were seeing with blockchain a few years ago: number go up. Number go up always! Unrealistic, unsustainable forever-growth must be guaranteed in this economic clime. If you can lay off all of your people and replace them with AI, number goes up big and never stops, right?
I have some doubts. ----------------------
The chips also haven't landed yet with regards to the legality of all of this. Will these adopters ultimately be able to copyright any of this output trained on datasets comprised of stolen work? Can computer-made art even be copyrighted at all? How much of a human touch will be required to make something copyright-able? I don't know yet. Neither do the hype team or the early adopters.
Does that mean the tech will be used but will have to be retrained on the adopter's proprietary data? Yeah, maybe. That'd be a somewhat better outcome, at least. It still means human artists make specific things for the machine to learn from. (Watch out for businesses that use 'ethical' as a buzzword to gloss over how many people they've let go from their jobs, though.)
Will it become industry standard practice to do things this way? Maybe. Will it still require an artist's sensbilities and oversignt to plan and curate and fix the results so that it doesn't come across like pure AI trash? Yeah, I think that's pretty likely.
If it becomes standard practice, will it become samey, and self-referential and ultimately an emblem of doing things the cookie-cutter way instead of enlisting real, human artists? Quite possibly.
If it becomes standard industry practice, will there still be an audience or a demand or a desire for art made by human artists? Yes, almost certainly. With every leap of technology, that has remained the case. ------------------ TL;DR Version:
I'm not saying with any certainty that this AI blitz is a passing fad. I think we're likely to experience a torrential amount of generative art, video, voice, music, programming, and text in the coming years, in fact, and it will probably irrevocably change the layout of the career terrain. But I wouldn't be surprised if it was being overhyped as a business strategy right now. And I don't think the immensity of its volume will ever overcome its inherent emptiness.
What I am certain of is that it will not eliminate the innate human impulse to create. Nor the desire to experience art made by a fellow soul. Keep doing your thing, Anon. It's precious. It's authentic. It will be all the more special because it will have come from you, a human.
911 notes · View notes
sethsclearwater · 24 days
Note
Paul headcanon right now—he’s definitely the type of guy to drive besides you if you have a tantrum, you insisting that you’re walking home after a petty argument but he wouldn’t leave you to walk alone duh. He’s 100% super protective and if it came to it he’d just throw you over his shoulder, with you kicking at his back.
UGHH I love him so much
-⭐️
PLEASE HE SO WOULD LMAO
...
"i told you i don't wanna look at you right now lahote!" you called when you realized that your imprinter was most definitely pulling up beside you in his car. despite the fact that it was pouring outside and you were already soaked, you had decided you'd rather walk back to your apartment in the rain than deal with arguing with paul over his family drama.
when paul didn't respond after a few moments, you decided to peek over your shoulder only to see him getting out of the car and striding over to you, "so fuckin' dramatic," he grumbled, low enough that you barely caught it but you did and immediately gasped, taking a step back from him.
"get in the car y/n," he ordered, clearly getting irritated over how wet you both now were getting thanks to your decision to walk home in the rain.
he rarely used your first name, generally only calling you pet names so you knew he was just as annoyed as you suspected he was. still, you decided to stand your ground and shook your head, "i already told you i don't wanna look at you," you countered, spinning back around so you could continue your miserable walk home in the freezing rain.
before you could even take a step, paul's hands were on your hips, spinning you around so he could throw you over his shoulder, "don't gotta look at me," you could tell he was rolling his eyes as he said it and you were immediately kicking your legs in every way possible to try and get him to put you down.
"put me down right now lahote!" you yelled despite your futile attempts to get out of his grip. paul was rolling his eyes again, not seeming to have much difficulty keeping you restrained as he pulled the passenger side door of his car open.
he was setting you down inside, sliding one hand to rest behind your head so he could be sure you wouldn't give yourself a concussion while you tried squirming away, "sit still," he ordered, voice somehow more firm with you than it had been a few moments prior which had you pausing your thrashing for a moment to look up at him, a flabbergasted look on your face as he buckled you in.
once he was confident you wouldn't be trying to run away, he crouched down next to you and allowed his eyes to meet yours, his gaze softening a bit when he saw the angry tears streaming down your cheeks.
"i'll drive you home," he reassured, "and then you don't gotta look at me until you want to, yea?" he suggested, sliding both of his hands over your thighs, the material of your leggings now soaked from the weather.
you sucked in a breath, not trusting yourself enough to talk yet so you settled for giving him a small nod which he seemed to find acceptable. he gave your thighs a gentle squeeze before he was getting up and shutting the passenger door, quickly coming around the car so he could get in the driver's side.
you had your arms crossed over your chest in a silent protest as he drove you back to your apartment, the drive only taking a few minutes before he was pulling into the parking lot.
once he had the car in park again, you allowed your gaze to drift over to him, "you gonna walk me in too?" you asked. you had intended for it to come across as sarcastic but instead your voice just came out much weaker than you'd anticipated which had paul letting out a heavy sigh.
he didn't want to rile you up anymore than you already were but he couldn't help how anxious he got at the thought of sending you inside alone so he settled for responding with a simple, "that's the plan."
you let out an equally heavy sigh, slumping back into the seat as paul got out of the car and came around to your side, pulling the door open for you, "i'll be quick," he reassured, crouching back down for a moment so he could uncross your arms and take your hands into his, "come on, yea?" he asked, waiting for you to nod before he was helping you get unbuckled and out of his car.
he was nothing if not a man of his word, staying silent as he guided you into your apartment complex, one hand on your lower back while he walked you to your door just as he said he would.
you fumbled with your keys, taking a few moments too long to open the door thanks to your shivering and the surging emotions currently going through your system. once you finally got the door opened, you stepped inside, quickly kicking your shoes off before you were spinning around to face paul who was patiently waiting in the door frame.
you really wished you could've come up with some kind of snarky remark to get rid of him but instead just found yourself staring at him, at a loss for words. your gaze was drifting down before you could catch yourself and you couldn't help the way you stared at the way his thin t-shirt was clinging to his skin.
"fuck it," you murmured to yourself, immediately stepping towards him so you could smash your lips against his. paul didn't hesitate before he was reciprocating and slamming you up against the wall.
443 notes · View notes
sturnsdoll · 25 days
Text
SWEETER THAN CANDY -`♡´- - C.S
Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media
idea creds
Tumblr media
pairing: chris x fem reader
summary: chris finds a rather creative way to teach you patience.
warnings: smut obvi, swearing, (very little) plot, light bondage, candy g-string, oral (f recieving), heavy teasing, dom!chris, sub!reader, orgasm denail, begging, degrading, praise, slight dumbification, cum eating(??), back scratching (?), choking
word count: 2,332
authors note: hope you enjoy ♥
"orange" = chris "pink" = reader
Tumblr media
your boyfriend chris had been busy all day with filming with his brothers, shopping, a meeting for his brand and what felt like a million other things.
one of those million other things had been him trying to keep you from losing your mind waiting for him to be free. you hadn't seen your boyfriend in a few days and the impatience of wanting not only his love, but his touch, was driving you to insanity.
text after text, call after call. chris was sick of telling you he'd be free at 12 and that you just needed to be patient.
it was currently 12:05 and chris was filming a car video with nick and matt. his phone buzzes for what feels like the millionth time tonight.
Tumblr media Tumblr media
you toss your phone down next to you with a sigh.
-ˋˏ✄┈┈┈┈
1:07 AM
half asleep, you're finally in the triplets parking lot to pick up chris so you can bring him back to your place. after a few long minutes of waiting you look to the passenger side of your car, spotting chris heading over.
when he enters the car, there's a bit of a slam to the way he closes the door but you choose to ignore it. you smile brightly at chris "feels like i've been waiting forever for you i-" "do you still have the thing i got from the store last week?"
you're confused by the question and a little taken aback that he didn't greet you. although there's a glint of mischief in his eyes that makes you clench your thighs. "no hi? hello? chris i've been waiting all day.." you go to wrap your arms around his neck but he grabs both your wrists. "wrong. you've been an impatient brat all day. now is it still here or not?"
it takes you a minute to even think of what the hell he's reffering to. that's when you remember chris had bought a candy g-string at the store last week when his brothers hadn't been watching the two of you. you thought it was more of a joke that he had gotten it though, not really expecting to use it.
your eyebrows knit together in confusion. you look at where his fingers are wrapped around your wrists before looking up at in hiw eyes again "yea, it's on the backseat still chris but i-" he cuts you off again, not wanting to hear it. "good. go find somewhere private to park. better be close though" "seriously? what's wrong with you?"he drops your wrists and gives you a dead serious look. "now." the tone of his voice makes you decide to put the car in drive.
-ˋˏ✄┈┈┈┈
you found an empty parking lot out back of a closed fast food place. the whole drive there chris's hand squeezed at your thigh harshly and anytime you tried to ask what his problem was he'd just tell you to keep your mouth closed and drive. which you did.
now that you were here, you opened your mouth to question his antics but he didn't let you get the chance. that angry yet needy look glosses over his eyes again "get in the back n' put it on" he says with a quick hand motion toward the backseats. you raise your eyebrow at him ready to protest but he wasn't having it. "do i need to repeat myself baby?"
you pause for a second before shaking your head no and doing as you were told.
now, only in your cropped t-shirt and the candy garment, you watch curious and nervous as chris removes his belt. "hands above your head" he commands and you listen. he brings your wrists behind the head of the car seat, binding them together with his belt.
"i think.." chris starts as he moves to his knee's infront of you "that for whatever fucking reason" he spreads your legs "you think it's okay to start acting out when you don't get what you want when you want it" his tone gets you wetter than you already were. you can't help the smile that spreads on your face at the satisfaction of having gotten the rise out of your boyfriend that you were hoping for. if only you knew how much you'd regret it only a few minutes from now.
chris catches the sly little smirk on your face. this makes him smile back, only his is much more menacing. "oh you think you're getting what you want huh?" he says. you shrug, staring back at him smugly. "we'll see." he says, mocking your text from earlier before he his mouth latches onto your left thigh.
his mouth moves smoothly, leaving a small trail of purple marks up your thigh. when he gets to your candy covered cunt he hovers teasingly for a moment before switching to the other thigh. you sigh impatiently, earning a threatning glare from chris.
this time when chris makes it to your heat his teeth close in on a candy just above your clit, mouth is so close yet so far. he bites the candy before eating it excrutiatingly slowly. once he's done he flattens his tongue against the front of the candies, shortly giving you the smallest amount of pleasure as he drags it up to where the waistline of the g-string is.
his teeth latch onto another candy but this time he pulls back, bringing the candy clad garment away from you. he quickly releases his teeth from it, letting it snap back against you.
you jump a little at the unexpected sting. chris smirks at your reaction before his mouth goes for another candy that's sitting right over your clit again. "chris come on" you complain but he stays focused on consuming the little candies.
-ˋˏ✄┈┈┈┈
you squirm in the seat, wrists uncomfortably wriggling against his belt as he sucks on another candy, his lips just barely brushing where you need him. it's been almost ten minutes now and you're soaked and needy, clenching around nothing everytime his lips or tongue accidentally ghost you.
"chris m' sorry i need you please" you attempt to beg, pushing your hips toward his face. he wraps both his arms around your thighs to hold them down and apart. "should've thought about that before whining and complaining all day hm?" he taunts before his teeth grip another candy "n' stop squirming" he says through gritted teeth while he sucks on the sugary candy.
this goes for a couple more minutes before he pulls away to look up at your face. you look just about ready to cry from sexual frustration. he smirks as he rubs your thigh soothingly. "what do you want baby?" his hand snakes up to your waist to pull the candy string back and let it snap against your skin again. you wince before speaking "your mouth, fingers, anything. please" not caring how needy you sound you beg him desperately. over the candies, chris presses two fingers over your hole. the feeling of the cold candies against you instinctively makes you attempt to pull your hips back but there's really nowhere for you to go.
he wraps his fingers around the garment and pulls it to the side before his head dissapears between your thighs. he gives an experimental flick to your clit before diving in to suck and nibble on your sensitive bud.
you throw your head back, a nearly pornagraphic moan comes out at the pure relief. to make things easier for himself he gives a harsh tug to the part of the candied underwear he was holding, causing the string to snap. candy spills off most of the garment and it goes all over the floor of your car. you instinctively try to reach out to pick up the candies or somehow stop the mess but your wrists only strain against the material of his belt again. "chris!" you whine annoyidly.
you're quickly silenced by two fingers teasing your folds. wetness coats his digits without them even being in you. "did i really get you this worked up, sweetheart?" he asks before holding his fingers up to your mouth "open". you comply and are immedietly met with his fingers pressing down on your tongue."taste sweeter than candy don't you?" he asks rhetorically before unexpectedly latching his mouth back to your clit. you cry out when he adds his two fingers along with it.
his tongue switches between flicking, sucking and nibbling so often that you can't even keep up with what form of pleasure he's applying. his fingers pump in and out at an extremely rapid pace that makes your hips twitch. the windows are foggy and the air in the car is heavy from both your heavy breaths.
your mouth hangs open as incoherent words and whines spill. he lets your clit go with a wet pop. his fingers continue. he pulls his head back a little to watch the way your body reacts to him, the way your face contorts in pleasure. you're already clenching around his digits. his fingers push deeper and curl up into that one spot that makes your mind go numb. "mph- m' close" you mutter out between desperate whines. "yea? you wanna cum on my fingers?"
you open your mouth to say yes when suddenly he pulls his fingers out, shoving them in your mouth again. "suck" he tells you while simultaniously reaching up to release your wrists.
with glossy eyes you look at him and suck your juices off his fingers. once he retracts his fingers you pull him in by his shirt to press your lips to his. the kiss is full of tongue and teeth. needy. he climbs onto the seat next to you before adjusting you until you're beneath him. his hips press down into yours making you both whine. you push your hips toward his. he pulls his face back to look at you consideringly. looking at him through your lashes you reach between the two of you to massage his erection through his pants "please." your voice is needy but sweet. "yea? wanna be a good girl and let me fuck you?" he asks while moving to take his sweatpants off. you nod with a sickeningly sweet smile as he finishes removing his clothes.
once he's situated, he makes a point of dragging his tip teasingly along your folds. you go to complain but he knows you too well. "uh uh. remember what that mouth did to get you here in the first place" he reminds. "well techinically it wasn't my mouth since it started over text so- mph!" one hand covers your mouth as he uses the other to balance himself while he thrusts his length into you.
he watches you in awe as he slowly pulls back out "not another word out of you" his hips snap right back. everytime he fucks into you, you're crying out into his hand. his speed starts steady and slow but that lasts no longer than a minute before he's messily pounding into you. you wrap one hand around the wrist of his hand that covers your mouth. your other creates deep red marks down his back, nails dragging and grabbing for some kind of support.
at this point everything that comes from his mouth are all mindless filthy comments. "gonna- mm- make sure that i f-fuck the rest of that attitude outta y-you" he assures as he abuses your cervix repetitievly. clenching around his dick at his filthy words causes his head to drop, a moan slipping his lips. even when his pace is sloppy he doesn't dissapoint, continuing reaching deep inside you with every movement.
it's not long before your minds set on wanting to finish. you reach between the two of you to stimulate your clit but chris swats it away. one hand shutting you up still, he uses his other to rub fast circles on your sensitive bud. you whine and he does too from the way your nails dig deeper into his skin.
his thrusts become sloppier and his fingers work faster. you try to speak but between him fucking you and his hand over your mouth it's impossible. luckily for you he knows by the way your breath is becoming shallow that you're close.
"not until i say so" when his hips begin twitching he slides his hand from your mouth to your neck to steady himself. "jesus chris" you manage to whine as you drink in the air, still slightly restricted by his hand on your throat. your legs tense around his body and you both know you can't hold off much longer.
"you wanna cum sweetheart?" you nod, letting out a soft "yes" breathlessly. "then ask me. gotta make sure you've- mm fuck- learned your lesson" he looks in your eyes with a look of admiration at how pretty and fucked out you are for him. "wanna cum so bad, m' sorry for compla- ah oh god" you don't get to finish as he grabs under your knee and spreads you wider, managing to hit deeper inside you "i'm sorry for complaining, pleasee let me cum" you draw out the please in a innocently convincing way. "listen so well. go ahead"
as soon as you have his permission your lower stomach twists inside as your legs clench right around his waist. all it takes is one more thrust and you're dripping around his cock. chris curses out your name with a string of obsceneties as your orgasm triggers his. he makes sure you both completely ride out your highs before he pulls out and retracts his fingers from your poor clit.
you both take what seems like years to catch a normal pace to breath at. chris reaches to the floor, obtaining both your clothes. "shower when we get home?" chris asks you as he becomes aware of the sticky residue of both cum and candy left on your body.
"absaloutely."
Tumblr media
(the plan wasn't for this to be that filthy idk what happened tbh but i'm not complaining if y'all aren't 😛 )
Tags: @ezziewinchester @sturnsblog @mattsrod @blue-for-percyjackson
664 notes · View notes
angelltheninth · 1 month
Note
can you do one with Ayato, wriothesley, diluc, alhaitham, and whatever character you like where they're lowkey obsessed with darling (a lil too much) and reader knows it and is definitely into it. Its to the point reader even triggers their yan instincts on purpose; wearing more revealing clothes that are equally as modest, talking more to men or other people in general more than them, stuff like that.
Preferably with hints of smut or implied, and lots of visible possessiveness.
Idk if ur still writing yan stuff so if ur no longer comfortable with writing stuff like this js ifnore this.
I'm okay with writing this, thank you for asking.
Pairing: Diluc, Ayato, Al-Haitham, Wriothesley x Fem!Reader
Tags: fluff, yandere fluff, possessiveness, marks, biting, kissing, protectiveness, obsession
A/N: I can only write soft yandere content.
Tumblr media
Diluc has you work for him only so he can keep a better eye on you, or rather so he can keep people away from you. There's also you wearing his signature colors that drives him up the damn wall and he can hardly contain himself when he sees you being so touchy and sweet with the people who come to drink. It's your job yes, but you're also his girlfriend so you should only run your hands up his arm like that.
Ayato doesn't have a ton of time to spend with you because of work but he makes very sure there are many signs of who you belong to when you're on your own. When you're his he is also aware that you're a target of many people, often you don't go out much if it's not in his company or a bunch of guards that know better than to try anything that would make him angry. If you go out with him he never lets go of your hand, you're to precious to let go.
Al-Haitham hates it when you tease him by talking other men in front of him. Well not even teasing, just being a little too friendly for your own good, giving people ideas that they shouldn't have because you're already in a relationship with a very loving boyfriend. The normally calm and collected Akademic kisses you with passion no one thought him capable of, all to make sure they know you're his, and that you know it too.
Wriothesley knows not to let his fists do the talking in situations like this, after all it's not your fault you're so beautiful that other men drool over you. But it is your fault that you chose to wear a dress that shows so much skin and all your soft curves. However you also chose the dress that does a wonderful job of showing off every bite mark on your body, from ankle to your neck, leaving nothing to the imagination of last nights activities.
1K notes · View notes
peachdues · 8 months
Note
Mayhaps some Sanemi NFSW headcanons 🤲
SANEMI SHINAZUGAWA NSFW HEADCANONS
Tumblr media
I neither regret nor apologize for how carried away I got with this.
CW: f!Reader • NSFW • MDNI • Sanemi’s oral fixation • breeding/creampie kink • switch!Sanemi • exhibitionism
・˳ . ⋆ .˳⁺⁎˚ ⋆・˳ . ⋆ .˳⁺⁎˚ ⋆・˳ . ⋆ .˳⁺⁎˚ ⋆
PHYSICAL ATTRIBUTES
He has a silvery happy trail that begins just below his navel and runs narrow before widening just before his groin. He really likes it when you drag your tongue down it (and it's a sure way to get him panting).
Below the belt, he keeps his hair neat and trimmed -- any time you're spent gagging on a stray pubic hair is time you're not spending with your mouth around his cock, and that's just a tragedy (but he doesn't give a shit whether or not you have hair!)
Now let's get to the good part: his dick
Physically, Sanemi's cock is just like the rest of him: absolutely intimidating. You lowkey think you're going to die the first time you see it because there's just no way in hell that's going to fit without splitting you in half, right???
He's above average in length -- about a solid 6.5-7 inches when hard, but he's about 2.5 of HIS fingers in girth. When he's erect, it stands straight up, with an angry, red tip that's already leaking because the man is eager -- and not just to be in you, but cum in you, too. Whether it's your mouth or your cunt, it doesn't matter, just know you're going to be filled no matter what.
Tumblr media
FOREPLAY
Sanemi's favorite snack might be ohagi, but after meeting you, it's your pussy.
Sanemi doesn't cow before anyone, but that man will drop to his knees for you with just a flutter of your eyelashes, head going straight between your thighs so he can have his fill of you until you're doubled over his shoulder, legs shaking so badly he has to hold you up.
His ideal day consists of you, sitting on his face, while being tongue-deep inside of your cunt. He can go at it for hours, your weight bearing down on him as your thighs cage his head, while he laps at your sweetness and wraps those sinful lips of his around your throbbing, overstimulated clit for a nice long suck.
the man is a connoisseur of cunt idk what else to say
Tumblr media
HOW HE FUCKS YOU
Let's go over your first time together.
Though he has an incredibly high sex drive, during those first couple of times, he exerts the self-control of a Buddhist monk.
This is also because for him, sex is more than just a way to feel good (though, don't get him wrong -- it feels fucking incredible). For Sanemi, sex also means being vulnerable; it means letting someone see him without the armor of his sword, his uniform, his status as the brutal, relentless Pillar he is.
So whether it's your first time ever or just your first time with him, he's going to be gentle -- because Sanemi would rather eat and shit glass than hurt you
Like come on, the man has buried too many of his loved ones already, he ain't tryin' to bury you, too
He's moving slow and languid, barely pulling out in favor of rolling his hips into yours. Part of this is for your benefit, because he wants you to feel him, but it's also for his.
Sanemi might be balls-deep in you at the moment, but he's still a Hashira, and his observation and perception skills are sharp. He's mentally taking note of what touches and movements make you gasp and sigh, and especially those that make you dig your nails into his back, tighten your legs around him, and whimper his name.
After a couple of times together (and I mean like two MAX), buckle up, buttercup: Sanemi is now an expert in your body and he's about to educate you.
Okay, now that the first time is out of the way, let's talk Sanemi in bed overall
This man is a moaner
I'm sorry, but Sanemi Shinazugawa has never known how to keep his fucking mouth shut, so what makes you think he'd do so in bed? When your slick, tight walls are gripping him like a fucking vice? Who tf do you think he is, Tomioka??
He's also a talker -- especially the more pussydrunk he gets. Whether it's your name, how much he loves you, that he wants to marry you or get you pregnant, the man may as well be giving a sermon in his devotion to you while your eyes are rolled back in your skull, mouth half-open as he fucks every sane thought you've ever had right out of your pretty head.
The man is a switch. He's a dom in every other aspect of his life, so it's nice to let loose with his lover a bit and relax -- let someone else take control. After all, sex for Sanemi isn't just about feeling fucking fantastic, but it's also about expressing with his body what he can't with his words.
When he's on top, he's a service dom. Your pleasure is his pleasure -- so even as his cock slides in and out of you, he's still going to work. He's not cumming until you've cum at least two or three times, and even after he's done, he's still going to make you cum again. He's constantly telling you how good you are, how beautiful you look in whatever position he has you bent in, and how perfect you feel around him.
That said, he's into both overstimulating and edging you -- but he's not too mean about either.
But when Sanemi is on the bottom?
The whiniest bitch you've ever met.
He's begging you to go faster, or simply to give him more, but you love teasing him as much as he does you, so you'll alternate your pace in order to prolong his torture (but hey, it just means he cums twice as much and twice as hard in the end).
Play with his balls while you're on top and he will cum so hard he goes cross-eyed for a hot second
I feel like the fandom largely agrees Sanemi has a breeding kink, but I also thinks this translates into a creampie kink in general. Sure, he'll cum on your face, your tits, your thighs as much as you want -- but only after he's filled your greedy little cunt to its brim, and then he'll do it one more time for good measure. You're his girl, after all, so he knows you can take it.
Initially, he'd pull out every time, mostly because he didn't know how to apporach the subject of asking you whether you were okay with him finishing inside. He didn't want to assume that you were taking some sort of medication to prevent an accidental whoopsie, but while he loves the idea of getting you pregnant and having a family, he doesn't want to force that on you if it's not what you want
(local mama's boy has childhood trauma?? from his father?? it's more likely than you think)
so Sanemi continues to pull out, instead painting your stomach, your thighs, or your ass with his creamy, hot seed, even though it pains him to do so.
That is, until one night, he's pounding into you so goddamn perfectly, with your legs draped over his forearms and ass nearly resting against his thighs as he ruts into you, his weight pressing deliciously down upon you into the futon. You can tell by the way his hips are slapping against yours, making the lewd, squelching sound of your messy cunt nearly drown out your breathy whimpers, that you're close -- so, so close, but then Sanemi tenses.
"I'm 'bout to cum," he manages to grit through his teeth, his hips stuttering as he goes to pull out of your intoxicating, silken heat. Through the haze he's created in your mind, your stomach clenches as you realize you're going to lose this -- this wonderful feeling of being so warm and so full of him. Your release is close, so fucking close, and if he pulls out now, it's going to be ruined and you're so desperate to cum. Your legs lock around his backside, trying to hold him in place, and his eyes widen.
"N-no, 'Nemi, please," you start to beg, and to his bewilderment, you start tearing up, lower lip quivering because he can't pull out, not when he's making you feel so good; not when you're so fucking close.
"Shit," he groans, and his hips pick right back up slamming against you, his biceps flexing as his arms tighten around your thighs. "Shit, sweetheart, you don't have to ask me twice."
After that -- pulling out??? never heard of her.
Tumblr media
KINK-O-CLOCK
Like I said: his biggest kink is giving you so many creampies, Hostess is thinking about offering him a job in product development
Fucking loves 69'ing, because he gets the best of both worlds -- your pussy on his face, and your mouth around his cock
Bit of a risk kink/exhibitionism kink. He likes the thrill of the risk of getting caught doing it in a place you two shouldn't be. He gets especially turned on at the thought of you having to go about your usual business while his cum is still oozing out of you.
Loves when you play with his ass but would rather be eaten by a demon than admit it.
Once, while you were on your knees in front of him, his cock jammed down your throat, you reached your hands around him to grip his ass and haul him closer. Somehow, your fingers dipped between his cheeks and the man bucked into you so hard, you almost choked.
Even though he nearly triggered your gag reflex, you were able to ignore it because the man let out a wholeass whine -- so of course, you had to do it again.
The second your index finger dipped towards his opening, he came in your mouth, and he came hard.
He likes to bite you/leave marks on you -- especially your breasts, your hips, and your inner thighs. He also enjoys when you mark him -- make sure to give him one or two on his chest, so he can display them proudly.
Truthfully, he loves when you pin him down by his wrists while riding him. Could he overpower you with a flick of his pinky finger? Yes. But something about your small hands wrapping so tightly around his while you hold him down against the bed, your hips grinding and swiveling up and down his length makes him go a little dumb in the brain.
Fun fact! You once restrained him by both his wrists and ankles and rode him and by the end of it, he looked like this:
Tumblr media
1K notes · View notes
chimielie · 24 days
Text
yeah, you might want me to drop dead (but i don't even care)
summary: Atsumu x F!Reader. atsumu would categorize your relationship like this: he thinks you're hot when you're angry. you would categorize your relationship with atsumu like this: he had woken up one day and decided to drive you out of your fucking mind insane. 
word count: 2k
cw: miya atsumu's degradation kink (it's still sfw he's just not subtle), suggestive at the end
a/n: another resurrected fic from the drafts. walk him like a dog, bitch, walk him like a dog
Miya Atsumu was a player known for his thirst for blood. Like his brother, who termed the all-consuming need to dominate their opponent hunger, he relished in complete fucking annihilation. He was hardly soft off the court, too: few of his peers could withstand his cutting humor, his teammates couldn’t understand how he hadn’t scared off his fan club, and he had crushed a few hearts beneath his heel in his time.
He’d met his match in the natural enemy of heartbreakers: his university’s resident maneater.
“Hey!” Atsumu calls your name, lengthening his stride to catch up to you. You grimace—he can barely see your side profile now, but oh, you’re slowing down so he can catch up. Unusually considerate.
Oh, no, there’s just a clog in the artery of the crowded hallway, halting your escape.
“Hi,” he sing-songs, stretching the word out several extra syllables. 
“Good morning, Atsumu,” you say tightly, drawing up your shoulders so your arm won’t brush his bicep in the limited space. “I was hoping you’d died, since you weren’t in lecture this morning. Better yet, maybe someone buried you alive last night and you hadn’t dug your way out yet.”
“You went with the option that doesn’t kill me! You care,” he says happily, and takes a moment to bask in it. “I was actually at a volleyball game, you should come to one sometime, I’m pretty good at it—”
“I’d rather walk in traffic, ‘Tsumu,” you shoot him a wide smile that makes his knees feel weak and wobbly and shove your way straight through the crowd of people, leaving only an uncaring ‘Scuse me! in your wake. 
A lot of people would categorize your relationship with Atsumu as complicated. Atsumu is not one of those people.
Atsumu would categorize your relationship like this: many moons ago, you and he had been in a few of the same classes and shared some mutual friends—mere acquaintances. He hadn’t known you very well. In fact, he’d thought you were cute, which he now knows you aren’t. A few minor catastrophes he wasn’t privy to later, you had come to verbal blows with some loser in the middle of the quad. You’d later found it rather embarrassing. Watching you eviscerate him, though, Atsumu had experienced a fear like never before. If he was bloodthirsty, you bathed in ichor. 
He would always remember the look on your face as you dealt the final blow and turned away, walking with a straight back right toward him.
Atsumu, who had never seen anything quite like the look of controlled rage on your face as you took that man apart. Who wasn’t sure why the sound of you doing your damnedest to instigate a fight made him shiver despite being all too warm inside. Who was looking up at you from his seat like a puppy, desperate to see you don your war paint again.
You walked past him, because of course you did. You weren’t pulled by the same magnetic force he was, focused on him like he was suddenly fixated on you. You were barely acquainted with him and obviously going to your friends for moral support and ice cream and whatever it was people did after one of them basically tarred and feathered someone in the town square. He was merely a bystander along the path you strode.
Of course, the very action of totally ignoring his existence cinched it: he was hooked.
You would categorize your relationship with Atsumu like this: he had woken up one day and decided to drive you out of your fucking mind insane. 
You’d tried to ignore him. He was persistent, though, and he just pushed and pushed and pushed until he crossed the line. It was exhausting.
Except that you kind of loved fighting with him.
You couldn’t help the adrenaline rush it gave you, the way he seemed to light a fire inside you no one else could and keep it burning hot. It was almost like a release to debate him, the way some people boxed or listened to heavy metal to destress. The feeling of victory never failed to put a sparkle in your eye and a cocky smirk on your lips; sometimes, you felt like he was stepping back and letting you win.
This continued in perfectly pleasant vicious and sometimes bloody antagonism for the course of forever until a few months ago, when Atsumu had begun the new and inimitable torture of flirting with you. It was horrible and it was weird and you had no idea what kind of mind game he was playing, but you certainly intended to find out. 
Atsumu, for his part, had recently realized that he likes it when you smile so much more than when you scowl. He likes it when you flutter your lashes instead of staring flatly into his soul, hoping to yank it out and set it aflame. He likes it when you say nice things to him, which has only happened once, but was very nearly a second sexual awakening and thus monumental.
He does not like it when other men flirt with you.
“Your pencil is broken,” Osamu notes, glancing down at his brother’s clenched fist. “You’ll get splinters.”
“What? Oh,” says Atsumu distractedly. “Yeah, I’ll do it later.”
Your laugh rings across the library, the warm glow of a fireplace instead of the burning fires of hell you share with Atsumu. His grip slackens, and his twin takes the opportunity to prise the pulverized writing utensil out of his hand. This kindness goes unnoticed as the guy, that’s how Atsumu’s thinking the word in his mind, low and mocking, guy, says something to you that makes him instinctively kick Osamu in the shin.
“Ow! Douchebag!”
“Sorry, reflex,” Atsumu apologizes.
“Do you want to go with me?” Asks the dickhead you’re talking to.
“To ice cream? Sure,” you reply, and you don’t even sound like you’re being sarcastic. What the fuck? There’s a long pause while the jagoff scuffs his shoe against the floor, a red flush coming over his face while you stare slightly past him with your trademark stare. But your lips are slightly turned up.
The expression haunts Atsumu on his walk back. Your smile was so pretty, sweet and soft. You never smile at him except mockingly. 
“At the risk of sounding like I care,” Suna says. “Are you okay?” 
“If I killed someone, would you help me get rid of the body?” Atsumu says, staring straight ahead.
“No,” Osamu says, “he’s finding out about human emotions and he’s coping very badly.”
Atsumu is ignoring you. As quickly as his interest (his desire to piss you off) had flared up, it had disappeared seemingly overnight, which was fine for you. It was great! You had booted the most annoying man in the world out of your life and replaced him with a perfectly nice guy. Your life was coming up roses.
Except it was driving you insane. You had your phone out, held an inch below your desk, leaving the perfectly nice guy (what was his name? You hadn’t saved it in your contacts and you weren’t sure why) on read as you stared across the room at the faux-blond.
He was chattering to another boy who looked bemused and patient; probably another volleyball player. You were half-convinced this was part two of his ploy to get under your skin; he was playing the unpredictable game.
As you try to bore a hole in his brain with your eyes, you see him glance back at you for a second, just a second, and that’s it. You slam your palms down on the desk, shooting up from your seat, trying not to make eye contact when a few other students turn and look at you because of the noise. He still won’t look directly at you as you make your way to his seat.
“I just remembered I have to leave,” says Atsumu’s friend—Aran, not that you care what his friends are called—picking up his bag. “I have to go be anywhere else right now.”
“What,” Atsumu whines as he books it away from the two of you. “Oh. It’s you.”
“Yeah,” you snap, folding your arms in front of your chest. You’re not sure why you’re so angry, just at the look of his melting chocolate eyes and hunched shoulders and pouty lips. Ugh. He’s the worst. “You’re avoiding me. Why.” The question sounds more like a sentence or maybe a threat.
“I’m not doing that,” he defends weakly. “Maybe I just got tired of looking at your face.”
“My face is fucking precious, okay,” you argue, “you should want to look at it all the time. Idiot. What’s wrong with you?”
“I do—I mean, what? What’s wrong with you?” He returns, and there’s the familiar snap and sting that you like so much. “You don’t even like it when I talk to you—”
“I don’t!”
“So why are you mad now that I’m not?”
“Because—” You struggle for reasoning. You can’t find it. Something strange and huge is crawling its way up your throat.
“Because, uh, um,” he mocks you, and you almost sock him. “Make up your mind! I was trying to be nice to you, even though it’s fucking boring!”
“I don’t want you to be nice to me!” You shout, and then curl over, your face nearly in his lap as almost everyone else in the room turns to look at you. One of the library workers shushes you loudly. “It’s—you’re right, it is boring. Everything else is fucking boring. I like it when you bother me, ‘Tsumu, okay?”
“Okay,” Atsumu says, eyes widening, leaning away from you as you seem nearly on the verge of manic combustion in front of you. “Then—I’ll keep doing it?”
“Will you?” You sit up straight and look him squarely in the eye. He gulps, unsure what he’s being asked. Something is fluttering in his stomach, but he’s hesitant to trust it.
“Yeah,” he breathes, and it feels like so much more than a confession.
“You’re so fucking annoying,” you say, in the same deceptively soft tone. “Can I kiss you?”
“Not if I kiss you—” You grab his face before he can finish talking and smash your lips onto his, first hard and like you’re trying to bully your way into his mouth, then a little sweeter, a little more tender. “First?”
“I win,” you say smugly as he tries to remember how to breathe.
“Please leave,” says the librarian. 
You live alone, which is amazing, because if Atsumu were to see his brother or teammates right now he might commit felony battery. In your apartment, which is full of trinkets Atsumu wants to examine but can’t because he’s very busy staring at you, you shove him onto the couch and sit on him. Sort of like you’re wrestling, but not at all.
“If we’re goin’ out,” he says, “we are going out, right?”
“Yes, ‘Tsumu,” you say, and your smile is as bright as the stars. He clears his throat and prays his voice doesn’t crack.
“Good. Uh, if we’re goin’ out, does that mean you have to start bein’ nice to me?” 
“I’ll be nicer to you,” you promise.
“Oh.” His tone is almost disappointed. 
“Or,” you lean down, and he almost chokes on his own inhale. “I can date you and be mean to you at the same time,” you say into his reddening ear, your breath hot and your smiling lips barely, just barely brushing his skin. Atsumu makes a squeaking noise that can barely be understood. “What was that?”
“Yes, please,” he says fervently.
You bite his earlobe teasingly, and he finds that really nice, actually. The nicest.
403 notes · View notes
angelicsoka · 1 month
Note
❛ he so likes her! ❜ wiru quinn and jack noticing luke is crushing
PROM NIGHT, l. hughes
part two <3
word count | 832 words
pairings | luke hughes x best friend!reader, platonic!jack & quinn hughes x reader
summary | luke’s brothers notice his crush on his best friend
prompt | ❛ he so likes her! ❜
warnings | not proofread. no use of “y/n”. mutual pining. reader and luke are oblivious. lowercase intended. this is a work of fiction, i am by no means saying this is how they act in real life.
a/n | i’ve been trying to write but i have very little motivation, but here's this! might make a part two if the people want it :)
being in love with your best friend was horrible. knowing he didn’t feel the same was down right torturous. at least, you assumed he didn’t feel the same.
luke hughes had been your best friend since sixth grade, when one of his buddies cruelly pushed into a locker as you had walked past. luke, angered by his friend’s actions, proceeded to shove him into a locker before going to check on you. the rest was history.
you were the golden retriever to his black cat, the sun to his moon, his ride or die. you two had been through thick and thin together, somehow managing to stay friends when no one else thought you would. 
unbeknownst to you both, jack and quinn had a bet going on how long it would take for one of you to admit your feelings for the other. a bet that had been placed after your senior prom, a night you could never forget.
it was chilly as you sat outside the gymnasium, no longer caring about dirtying up your dress, the night already ruined. you had found your date with his lips locked with another girl, but that wasn’t what hurt the most: it was seeing your best friend slow dancing with girl; a girl that wasn’t you. 
you wiped at the angry and jealous tears as they streamed down your rosy cheeks, angry at yourself for being jealous, angry at yourself for falling for the one boy you could never have.
“hey, there you are! we’ve been look– are you okay?” luke poked his head out the door, concern growing when he noticed the tears that stained your rosy cheeks. you were quick to wipe the remaining tears as luke walked out, letting the door shut behind him. he joined you on the curb as you tried to get rid of the evidence that you had been crying, but it was too late.
“i’m fine, lu. go back in there, have a good time. i’m gonna head home, i’m not feeling the greatest.” you felt guilty about lying to your best friend, not only about not feeling well, but about your feelings.
“you are a terrible liar, you know that?” you couldn’t even look him in the eyes. “fine, don’t tell me, but at least let me drive you home.” you attempted to argue, but luke was stubborn. you both were.
“i don’t want you to miss out on the fun.” you said as luke guided you to his car.
“eh, i wont be missing any fun when the life of the party is in my passenger seat.” luke attempted to entice a smile out of you but it just sent a pang to your heart. “plus, i’d rather hang out with you.” he shrugged.
“what about your date?” 
“oh, she snuck off to make out with ex.” you shot him a look of pity, luke shrugging it off as he backed out. “i knew she was using me to make him jealous, but honestly i don't care.” you knew though that luke was hurt by it, at least more than he was letting on. the rest of the ride was silent, your eyes trained out the window until luke drove right past your house.
“luke, you just passed my house.” you looked to your best friend, eyebrows furrowed.
“i know. i figured we could watch a movie.” you internally groaned. he was not helping you get over this crush, that was for sure. still, you went along, following him into the house when you arrived. 
it was late, his parents still out wherever they had gone, and quinn and jack were somewhere around the house. you accepted the sweats and shirt luke offered you, going to change out of your dress. when you entered the living room, luke had already picked out your favorite movie and was microwaving popcorn. you sat on the couch, cuddling into a blanket he had laid out.
luke joined you moments later, handing you the bowl of popcorn and taking a seat next to you. he started the movie, but you couldn’t focus, not with him as close as he was to you.
soon, the tiredness began to take over, your eyes drooping. it wasn’t long before luke heard soft snores coming from you, your head resting on his shoulder. it brought a smile to his face as he too began to fall asleep. that was how quinn and jack found the both of you; luke’s head rested against yours which was on his shoulder. quinn placed a blanket over you both, before taking a picture of you, a smile on both your faces.
“he so likes her.” jack snickered, quinn nodding along.
“i bet you fifty bucks he tells her first.” quinn whispered as he sent the picture to his parents who were rooting for you two to get together.
“make it a hundred but it’ll be her.” they shook on it before you leaving you to rest.
487 notes · View notes
newfallstrangeleaves · 8 months
Text
Yandere with a unknown identity
A helping hand
Tumblr media
Yandere policeman x F!reader Warning: Manipulation, mentions of not believing the victim. Summary: Right after your encounter with the masked man (This part), you head out and find yourself with an officer who strongly feels that he should be the one to help you.
The masked man had just left when it dawned on you what happened. Violated and angry you grab the money he left behind and hurry down to whatever garbage chute you could find. You had barely time to put your clothes on before you were out the door. It's late and only the sound of your footsteps can be heard. 
It's first when you step outside of the apartment building and the cold air hits you that you come to your senses. Today has been horrible and it seems that your bad luck is not over yet. Considering your options you come to the conclusion that you don't want to stay and the walk to one of your friends' apartments is not long. You sigh as you know you will have to tell her what happened. Something you don't initially want, but what other options do you really have? 
You dont walk for long before a police car spots you. You can imagine how odd you must look walking around with a stack of money and dressed in your pajamas. 
The two officers consist of a tall rather young man and a middle aged plump woman. With the lack of anything else to tell them, you explain what has happened to you. The unfiltered truth as to where you got the money from and why you are out on the streets dressed so poorly. Both the man and woman listen intently to your story and when you are done the woman says. 
“Okay, listen, we will solve this. I just have to make a call to the surrounding officers. But Kenny will keep an eye on you, understand?” The plump woman tells you before she returns to the car. Her face is turned away from the both of you as she talks into the comms. A minute goes by in silence. Then two. Then five and she is still talking. For every minute passing worry grows. 
Then around the corner speeds another police car in and stops on the other side of the road. A young blond man jumps out, his uniform looks slightly untidy as if he had just thrown them on. He gives a nod to Kenny before he heads for the woman in the car. They talk quietly for a moment before he walks up to the both of you. 
“I'll take over from here officer McCall.” I can't help but feel like Kenny is letting out a sigh of relief as he heads back to the car. Before they drive off the woman rolls down her window and tells you.  
“If you need more help, ask for Officer Reese.” You nod to her before they drive off. The man beside you lets out a sigh and nods in the direction that they drove off at.
“Some officers truly need more than just reprimands.” He says and shakes his head. 
“What do you mean?” 
“I'm going to be truly honest with you. Officer Reese had not so good intentions regarding how to handle your little…issue. But I won't go into detail about that.” He takes a deep breath before he places a hand on your shoulder and continues. “And the other officers won't help you either, I know how shallow they can be. But I want to help.” 
“Her, Officer Reese, she won't help me? I thought…” 
“She just said that to make you feel better. In reality she was talking about the loony bin over the comms.”
Your stomach turns at his words and you have to turn away, just to gather yourself. 
“But I will help.” He continues. 
“You would?” 
“Yes, but I think it's better if we keep it between us two, are you fine with that?” You nod and take a deep breath to try and keep your emotions together. 
“Good, how about I drive you back to your apartment and you tell me in detail everything that happened.” 
“I… I don't know if I want to be at home right now.” You say hesitantly. 
“Don't worry, honey. I'm patrolling these streets and I'll make sure no man gets even close to you.” He says and places his arm around you. “Aren't you cold? Come let's continue talking in the car.” He says as he leads you to his car. 
“Well, if you're helping, do you have any access to something that you could find fingerprints with?” 
“Eh, sure, but what are you going to use that for?” He asks as he leads you over the street. 
“For these, I thought maybe you could get his fingerprints, oh well, mine will be here too, but…” He laughs and carefully takes the money from you. 
“If you don't want to use it for yourself then sure I can have a look.” 
“Oh and by the way. I never caught your name.” 
“It's Robert, Officer Robert Finch.”
1K notes · View notes
enkvyu · 10 months
Text
3:36pm — gojo satoru;
Tumblr media
perhaps it's because gojo has never needed to drive, that makes him so bad at it.
you clutch the handle on the car door with a deathly grip as gojo manhandles the steering wheel, a cheerful tune on his lips. one elbow rested on an open window, the other casually caressing the wheel, his feet playing toesies with both the brake and the accelerator, you wonder if this was the end for you. at least he was wearing his sunglasses today.
what kind of confidence allows him to drive one handed, you wonder, but the thought is quickly rammed into the crevices of your mind as the car takes another sudden turn. you think you vaguely hear gojo hum a quick "oops, almost missed the exit!" but you'd rather believe he didn't.
you can't even focus on the scenery as it darts past the window, but it looks akin to something from a scifi film when an eager cast of space pilots jump a wormhole. except you’re neither an astronaut nor in space, you’re just an unfortunate soul stuck in a car driven by your best friend.
"that wasn't so bad." gojo chuckles, sparing getou and shoko a glance through the mirror.
"was that the grim reaper i saw around that past corner?" shoko asks, holding her cigarette with a shaky hand. you've never seen her tremble like that before.
"you saw it too?" getou groans, almost taking up the entire space in the backseat as he was previously relocated when gojo decided to take up the challenge of tackling an intersection. "my whole body is sweating. i don’t think i’ve ever sweated this hard in my life"
"don't get your gross germs in my car. and shoko, where did the cigarette come from? didn't i tell you no smoking inside?" gojo complains. his eyes flicker back on his best friend as he doesn’t receive an answer. "i'm being serious, getou, don't sweat on my car, i just got it today!"
"so why are you testing fate with every corner?" your words raise an octave as you look forward again, gojo's car swerving around another one incoming. "gojo, watch out!"
the driver’s face through the tinted window of the other car reflects your own as they barely skim the encounter. an angry voice pokes out from the window but the noise is lost as gojo drives on, completely unfazed.
a series of beeps chase after gojo’s car, and amidst the chaos, was that a siren? the right side of the car flies up as gojo rides over the curb before settling harshing back on the asphalt road. he glances over his shoulder and mutters: “who put a tree in the middle of the road?” under his breath.
your fingers dig into the car door. they hover over the handle, ready to flick it open and jump out.
"eyes on the road!" getou calls from the back.
"my parents told me it's impolite to not look the person you're talking to in the eye!" gojo all but sings.
"let me out." shoko says quietly, and when she's ignored she says it again. "gojo, let me out!"
"you're driving on the wrong side!” your shriek comes out unprepared. “move over the line!"
"it's a double line, that's illegal."
"are you serious? tell me you're not serious. hurry up and move, there's a car coming!"
“i think we’re being chased!”
"stop the car, i want out!"
"we're not even at the school yet, i can't stop now."
someone had to stop him.
"gojo!" you scream. "i want to stop by the convenience store, stop the damn car!"
he glances over at you and you really wish he didn't, because he has to spin the wheel a whole 360 and more to miss a parked car. "why didn't you say so? of course we can stop. now that you mention it, i'm craving icecream."
"i'll get you all the icecream you want if you could just pull over." getou offers from the back. glancing back, you see a thin sheen of sweat on his forehead.
"getou, your sweat." you sob and he hastily rubs it away.
"i'm sorry gojo, please don't keep driving because of this."
gojo huffs. "i already said i was stopping. why is everyone acting so weird today?"
the car revs, swerves and spins completely around, throwing you out of your seat. “i saw a store back this way.” the driver says.
getou dominos over on top of shoko who can no longer vocally complain as her throat was seized by fear. you look over at the maniac who caused this situation and realise it was him making the woop woop! noise. you had thought you were hallucinating.
gojo approaches the carpark, yet to everyone's dismay he doesn't slow. "trust me guys, i saw this move in a dream." when no one says anything, he decides its because he needs to clarify. "it was prophetic."
the car continues, accelerates even, as he beelines towards a single parking slot sandwiched between two other cars. there's no way, you think, but gojo was always about doing the impossible. was that shoko praying in the backseat? you didn’t realise she was religious.
just as you were sure you were going to crash, gojo spins the wheel, jerking the car around before reversing straight into the parking slot.
your head slams against the headrest painfully before being forcefully yanked upwards again. the momentum knocks the air out of your lungs and you gasp. distantly, you hear getou groan in pain and when you look back, you find shoko on the floor.
"so?" gojo turns to smile at you, brightly. "how was it?"
you smile back and throw up all over him.
Tumblr media
1K notes · View notes
a-d-nox · 2 months
Text
pac/pap: message from your secret admirer
take what resonates leave what doesn't - nothing is 100% for you because these aren't personalized so please no angry comments or dms about what i am saying not being a good fit for you or that you "don't claim" just keep scrolling if that is the case. be kind, self reflect, and have fun.
last pac/pap: message from your past lover/crush
want a personal reading? click here to check out my reading options and prices!
Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media
pile 1
they lack self-confidence to get close to you - they might even not trust themselves around you. they might fear acting up or looking foolish around you. they are very apprehensive about taking action and you not accepting them as they are.
they find your personality very sexy. it's like they enjoy when someone takes charge - you don't mind taking up space and making your presence known and they adore that. your ambition, drive, and authoritative personality is addicting to them.
of course, they find you attractive - they worry that you don't find them attractive... they think that you won't take a chance on them and that you might not be open to a relationship/date with them because of how they look.
you are supportive. maybe you supported them or encouraged them in some way, or maybe they have seen how you interact with the people you care about. they can tell that you are a genuine person.
its wild; i feel like this person has a very active imagination. they might dream of marrying you or what being married to you would be like. they like the idea of walking with you on their arm. i feel like they wonder if they wait long enough and linger in the background that perhaps you will make the first move. they really like you. they think about the timing very often - they believe that you are the one for them. they really hope that you feel the same and are attracted to them. this is beyond lust for you - they love you.
pile 2
this is going to be a by chance meeting - you aren't going to run into each other everyday. you'll have a very positive few days with this person then it will be one of those things where it's like do you or don't you. perhaps this will be a "the one that got away" moment.
i feel like the connection is moving too quick for there to be much visibility into whether or not they even know much about you. so this connection has to make its own hold pattern - slow down a learn a bit more about each other. if someone peaks your interest, ask for their number.
i feel like you are out of your element with this connection. you don't see your beauty like they see it. you probably don't think they are attracted to you. you just need some confidence - trust that you are beautiful and make your move; stop waiting for masculine energies to make the first move.
they see that you lack confidence despite you being pretty and deserving attention. you are careful about what you do and what you say - this intrigues them. they are so curious about what you would say/do if you had the confidence to do so.
i feel like, unfortunately, no one will make a move in this situation. so you will keep to yourselves and spend time in solitude. stop thinking about what could have been and make it happen. you don't have to be unhappy with your present circumstances. start making a shift in your beliefs. you can put an end to your feelings of loneliness; you just have to change your mindset - abundance awaits you.
pile 3
they doubt themselves around you. i feel like you are rather close to them in their day-to-day life, but they don't think they can gain your attention. they tried - believe me, they have, but they just don't feel they are getting anywhere like they hoped they would.
they have been getting to know you for quite a bit of time. they love how passionate you are about the world around you. they also enjoy that you are building something for yourself.
you are very lovely to them. you are just at the beginning as your beauty journey too - you are going to continue to blossom and bloom.
you hold back which intrigues them. you can resist what others indulge in, which attracts their interest. you celebrate the small wins in very minimal ways, which they adore.
something is changing in the near future. you have to accept this connection as it is - i feel like you guys could be great for one another in the romantic sense, so why not try it? you can build a future together. this person wants to help you to grow in new and exciting ways. pay attention to subtle hints and messages from those around you. communication, fresh perspectives, and opportunities are ahead of you.
401 notes · View notes
matrixbearer2024 · 2 months
Text
Blips In My Routine
Vox x CollegeStudent!Reader
Tumblr media
A/N: A slight interlude in the "Get Off My Screen!" Series to keep you guys entertained while I write it's continuation. I apologize that it's taking so long! School's kind of been kicking my ass recently and I've had to focus more on work than my fanfics. Don't worry though, I'll still be writing more Vox content(Lord knows we don't have enough /j) as long as you guys want to see it!
A/N: I love 🥭 Anon's idea and tbh I don't put it beyond Vox to do it either, I'm not sure if this is as good as the other installments but I hope you guys enjoy it nonetheless. Btw, reader is in college so she's somewhere in her mid to late twenties. Happy reading!
You glanced at the ticking clock above the whiteboard.
It was just five more minutes before the bell would ring and free you from this boring lecture.
You fought to keep your eyes open as your gaze wandered back to the teacher's PowerPoint.
You hated this subject the most, not even because of the topic itself.
Rather, the professor could be kind of an old-timey asshole.
Thankfully though, it wasn't all that bad.
Not when you had to deal with an equally irritating digital companion anyhow.
Somehow you'd rather take Vox's bullshit over your professor's-
Speaking of, you both had fallen into a somewhat odd routine in the following months.
From greeting each other when you woke up or went to sleep-
To checking up on the other every so often within the day.
Not to mention spilling gossip when anything remotely interesting happened.
Either on his end or yours.
Like that time you saw someone's skirt snag in their locker door and just rip.
You could only snicker at their panic and shame.
The bitch highkey deserved it anyway.
Vox couldn't stop laughing when you eagerly told him all about it.
He knew you could be vicious if you wanted to.
Even if he was aware how much more inherently kind you were compared to the likes of him.
Sometimes the fact you found his companionship worth maintaining-
Or at least tolerable enough to keep-
Genuinely surprised the tech overlord.
Especially because you'd both been communicating for a little over a year by now.
It was nice interacting with someone else that weren't Velvette or Valentino.
Not that he'd ever openly admit to it.
It wasn't like Vox hadn't seen or heard you either, despite the fact he couldn't directly mess with the microphone or camera on your devices.
Your photos and files had more than enough stuff.
You often left him imagining your reactions and voice whenever the both of you chatted.
After all, most of your interactions were practically texting.
Sometimes you even wondered if Vox was constantly bored to end up finding companionship with you.
Or maybe he was lonely, who knows.
You genuinely couldn't be fucked.
He was an interesting guy and that was all that kind of mattered to you at the moment.
Your notepad window popping up snapped you out of that train of thought.
Glancing over at your laptop screen, the small desktop pet Vox gave you merely sat in the corner pointing at the notepad.
Oh it could do angry emotes too-
A slurry of words started pouring into the blank open text window, you figured Vox was probably having another shitty day.
Geez, who would've thought that hell would actually be absolutely crappy?
Well, let's see what he's complaining about this time...
This man was really typing way faster than you could read-
You were able to garner pretty quick what he was bitching about though.
Even if you kind of found the source of his irritation quite childish and kinda stupid.
"It's so dumb! The fact I can only talk to you with this goddamn thing is driving me insane!"
"Aaaand? What's wrong with the notepad? You also have the desktop companion."
You definitely started calling it that only because Vox was getting pissy that you were referring to it as a 'pet'-
"It can only do so much dollface, it's just glorified texting at this point. Besides, the tiny version of me is just an animated emoji keyboard."
"Well you already mess with my software regardless of what I tell you, what's stopping the great 'Technology Overlord' from hacking my camera and microphone?"
"Haha, very funny doll. Don't you think I would've done it already if I could?"
At this point you kinda just wanted to laugh at the whole situation.
Vox, a demon, one who could control electronics to his every whim-
Or so he claims.
Was being pissy about not being able to talk to you properly.
You couldn't tell if that was supposed to be endearing or hilarious.
He always got worked up over the smallest inconveniences.
You saw it as him being just very observant-
But it could also highkey be from his captain control freak tendencies.
"Then just make an app or something, you'll figure it out. Mess with the software settings or whatever."
That was the last message you wrote before the school bell suddenly rang out loud and clear.
You didn't even read his reply before shutting your laptop down and arranging your belongings.
Soon enough, you were the first one out of the classroom and more than ready to go home.
Vox knew you'd shut down your laptop after he got hit with his custom Voxtech screensaver.
Similarly to the wallpaper, he'd changed your screensaver to something more on brand.
While he did take your suggestion into account, a part of him wondered why he didn't bother trying in the first place.
But given the issues with him trying to access the built-in camera and microphone-
Vox felt a little concerned that modifying your devices too much could corrupt them.
That alongside all of your files and the data you had stored.
Wait...
Concern?!
He didn't actually care about your shit did he?
Oh fuck it!
He'll do whatever he wants to!
He was still careful not to really change much, he knows how annoying file corruption is and he didn't want to actually damage your data in case it had stuff you needed.
You weren't surprised that he'd taken your words literally-
You noticed a peculiar looking app appeared on all of your devices when you had arrived home.
That's a really fancy looking V design, was this Vox's doing?
Upon opening the app, you were greeted to a slightly odd looking interface.
It looked kind of like a more... sci-fi-esque styled chat room?
You wanted to say it lowkey looked like an Omegle room-
Before you could really nitpick at the design though, a text notification popped up on your phone.
You had just set everything up too, it seems like it came from the new app.
"Testing, testing. Are you getting this (Y/N)?"
To say you were amazed at what Vox had done was an understatement.
He was able to do so much in just so little time-
Just- how???
Oh, right- you should probably reply to that-
"Yeah yeah, I gotchu."
"Fucking finally! Working around your firewalls and antivirus was an absolute nightmare!"
Aaaaaaaand here came the usual ranting and bitching-
You just threw your phone on the bed and left to take a shower and freshen up while he kept at it.
Vox was actually quite proud he got the app to work.
Especially without affecting the existing system on your computer much.
If anything, it wasn't any different from the games or social media applications that already existed on your computer.
Granted, when he first booted the app to try it- the darn thing kept crashing and glitching.
But that was easily and swiftly dealt with.
Well, after much frustration and screaming but yes- taken care of.
By the time you came back, you saw an animated version of your wallpaper appear windowed in the app.
Right... that was supposed to be his face.
"Hello? (Y/N)? Can you hear me?"
What-
What the fucking FUCK-
Apparently, the thing you thought that was just a gif or an emoticon was actually a livestream of Vox's face.
And that was how he sounded like?
Okay that seemed pretty on brand for a telecasting television now that you think about it-
But how the hell did he manage to do this-
"Vox?! What the hell!"
You yelled out in retaliation, only growing more confused when Vox didn't reply or just kept repeating if you could hear him.
So he couldn't hear you, but he found a way to sort of project himself into your device.
What kind of upside-down thing is this?
Picking up the phone, you quickly used the chat-box to reply.
"I can hear you, but I don't think you can hear me?"
Vox just audibly cursed from what you could guess was frustration, staying silent and presumably typing out a reply.
Just how long had he been trying to fix this problem?
"I can't access your cameras or microphone whatever I do dollface, this was my last resort."
Seeing his live reactions allowed you to notice the genuine frustration and exasperation he had with the situation.
It kind of made you feel a little guilty for just brushing him off all the time now.
You always thought it was quite... old-timey for Vox to want to talk to you face to face.
Hold a "proper" conversation as he put it.
But maybe that was just because he grew that fond of your company.
Geez, what a sap.
"It's fine dude, I'm glad you made a specially designated space for our conversations though. My notes were starting to get cluttered with our conversations stuck in there with my school stuff anyway."
You could swear the small smile you saw on his face made saying all that worth it.
There really wasn't any reason for you two to switch mediums, but the new app wasn't unwelcome.
You were really starting to care more about this dumb TV head.
As you and Vox went back into comfortable regular conversation, you found solace as both you and your companion once again fell back into the odd routine you grew used to.
Come morning however, you were seriously reconsidering giving Vox the idea about making that custom application.
It was a stupidly large can of worms that you didn't even realize existed-
Notification after notification, you wondered just how much time the technology demon had on his hands to constantly bother you.
"Vox, I know you're happy about your app but can you stop spam sending me memes for five seconds?"
"Eh, not feeling it."
"Go to hell you dumb picturebox."
"Already here dollface, already here."
You facepalmed.
What an idiot.
Well, he was your idiot.
A/N: I'm leaning towards this being more than a just friends thing, dunno if I'll make it romantic or not in the continuation but I'd reckon that Vox and reader would get pretty close by now sooooo hahaha have fun y'all :D
411 notes · View notes
hunnylagoon · 4 months
Text
Right Where You Left Me
Pt 4: The Sweetest Thing to Ever Scare You (Finale)
Ellie Williams x reader
Tumblr media
I remember when I first saw you. I remember looking into your warm almond eyes and feeling butterflies in my stomach. But soon, when I looked into your eyes, I no longer felt the same warmth that I once knew. It felt as though you had killed all of the butterflies inside my stomach but yet, I still loved you.
Premise: You and Ellie are childhood best friends until you drift apart. Funny thing about soulmates is they tend to find their way back to each other. You and Ellie try to end the tireless war between you.
Warnings: Angst / drinking / violence / not really religious mentions in this one
Part one here!
Part two here!
Part three over here!
Guys I thought I posted this two days ago but I actually just saved it to drafts. Sorry for being an idiot lmao
I think that I have unlearned how to love.
That’s not even a word but there is no other way to tell you that I have turned myself cold.
Without partying to distract me and religion to fill in gaps of emptiness, I isolate myself and begin to write once again. I'm almost certain that my body has been telling me to write, that I need to pour myself into art as opposed to a girl I was friends with a million years ago.
I figure that I need to create rather than destroy but it might take me a while to do so.
The morning after I abandoned my faith on the church floor, I had woken up and expected Ellie to be gone, however, she was wide awake and playing subway surfers on her phone. Her hair is messy and her eyes are half-lidded. 
She turns to look at me when she feels the shuffling of the bedsheets; despite her doing nothing more than smile at me it is like an understanding passed between us, war is over.
Almost.
It's like I've forgotten how to be soft, I can't manage to get the words out that I need to, and the thought of it alone makes me cringe. "Breakfast?" I ask, unsure of what else to say.
Ellie passes on it and I awkwardly excuse myself, saying that I got called in to take a brunch shift at work. Of course, this is not true. What I do is get into my car and drive and drive until I get mad at myself for burning gas. 
The war between Ellie and I had ended but it didn't register in my head, I almost fell in love with it. Without the constant arguing and passive aggressiveness, there was nothing to put a wall between us and I wasn't ready to be vulnerable again. 
So I begin to feed Ellie the ugliest parts of me; I show her everything I'm sure she will hate but she doesn't, she's patient and shows me the kindness I have been looking everywhere for. Still, I am cold to her, I don't know what else to do. 
I try to push her away all over again but this time, she doesn't let me. Ellie comes into my room when I'm studying to sit on my bed so that she can be in proximity to me. Sometimes she'll ask me if I want to go for a walk or a late-night gas station run, all of the things we used to do.
When I'm angry at her, she lets it happen, she won't escalate the fight all she does is apologize and does what she can to fix it. Everything feels like it's in order again, Joel even starts to send me little text messages to check in on me and sends me Facebook memes that make him think of me.
As of now, we are setting up for Dina's twenty-first birthday. The living room, typically a space for casual gatherings and movie nights, had undergone a transformation. Vibrant streamers adorned the walls, and an array of balloons in assorted hues scattered themselves along the floor "Are balloons too childish?" Abby asks as she walks out of her bedroom.
"They better not be after I just spent half an hour doing all of these," Cat answers, giving her a scornful glare.
"They look great, Cat," I smile and give her a thumbs-up from where I am in the kitchen dumping bags of chips into bowls. "Should I make a veggie platter?"
Cat furrows her eyebrows "If you can finish it by yourself, sure."
"Cat, we aren't children, adults eat vegetables," Abby takes a seat on the couch behind Cat, investigating the hard work she's put into making the living room look nice for just one night "Isn't it weird that Dina is organizing her own surprise party?"
I shrug, placing a wooden cutting board down on the kitchen counter "I don't blame her, I don't think we've always been one hundred percent reliable, me specifically."
"But it's not a surprise if she knows about it."
"So?" Cat asks.
"So why are we calling it a surprise party if it isn't a surprise?"
"Why not?"
"Well, why can't we just call it a party?"
"I don't think it matters," I cut in, I begin to peel carrots and slice them up into quarters. Ellie comes out of her bedroom, she took a nap after completing her physics presentation, her hair in a messy bun, and she's in her typical pyjama uniform of sweats and a hoodie. "Hey, Ellie," I smile at her.
She rubs some sleep away from her green eyes "Hey," Ellie walks over to the kitchen island where I slice and chop vegetables and sits right in front of me. Even half asleep she looks like a statue of marble carved by a skilled hand.
Abby raises an eyebrow, asking 'When did you guys become friends?' without saying it and then it hits me like the plane in Lost. Ellie still hasn't told anyone about our history, our sixteen years of friendship is invisible to the eyes of those who think they know us well.
I'm broken from my thoughts when Abby speaks up "When are you picking up the cake?"
My heart drops "I'm not?"
Cat and Abby cast one another side glances while Ellie snatches a cucumber off my cutting board "Dina was handing out duties and you said you would take care of the cake."
I freeze, unsure of what to say "Nuh-uh." I shake my head like a child denying blame for breaking her mother's favourite dish.
"Yuh-huh," Cat shoots back. "How could you forget that?"
My mind fumbles for an excuse and somehow I land on "I forgot because I went temporarily insane from Lyme disease," What am I saying? "I got Lyme disease because I go camping in secret," I don't camp "And I never told you guys that I go camping because I'm deeply ashamed of it."
Now everyone looks perpetually confused, Ellie included "What are you talking about?" Abby asks, her eyebrows furrowed.
"Okay-well," I place my knife flat on the counter by the wooden cutting board, ignoring the odd spiel I just went on "I'm going to drive to-
"You dropped your car off for a suspension repair yesterday," Abby reminds me.
"Ellie is going to drive me to get a cake," I correct myself "I will be back to finish making my veggie plate." I quickly rinse my hands before grabbing Ellie's keys from the little jewelry dish on the island and yank the sleeve of her hoodie to pull her along.
Ellie doesn't say anything, she slips into some Crocs and we walk outside to her car. "Where are we headed?"
"Uh, hang on," In Ellie's passenger seat, I go on Google Maps to look up the closest bakeries that are still open at this hour, there are two, one a couple of streets away and the other one is across town and closing in twenty minutes. "Infectious Confections," I wrinkle my nose "That's a weird fucking name."
While Ellie tries to make conversation in the car I only speak when giving her directions to the bakery. She knows something is up and I can tell by the way she keeps glancing at me. I just can't manage to get it out of my head that she's still keeping me a secret. 
She pulls up to the bakery and I get out before she even turns her car off, she pulls the keys out of the ignition and trails behind me through the doors.
The bakery itself was rustic and clean, there were two display cases and tills one of the displays held danishes, croissants, cookies, scones and whatever those little swirly flakey things are called. The other display had a big chalk menu above it that read 'Cakery' Though what was in the display case was very sparse.  
"Hi," I walk up to the till, putting on the friendly smile and customer service voice that I usually only use at work. "This is pretty short notice but I was wondering if you had any cakes left or if I could get one made for today?"
The guy behind the counter is a scrawny teenager who looks like he has had a long enough day of dealing with annoying customers "We close in half an hour, there's not enough time to bake and decorate a cake." He explains it like he's said this to a million people, he's bored of the same phrases that his manager has scripted out for him.
"Any shot that someone didn't pick up their cake?" I ask, fingers crossed in the hope that he says yes.
"Let me talk to my manager," His voice drags on, and he turns around and disappears through a commercial kitchen door. I wait patiently, hands balled together in front of me as I rock back and forth on my heels. A minute or two later he comes back holding a bright blue cake with pink detailing of bows and mustaches, there's text on it that reads 'It's a...' gender reveal cake. "This is all we have left, they cancelled last minute.
I look back at Ellie to get her opinion, her eyebrows are furrowed slightly "Maybe we good just get some of those cupcakes and smush them together and smear the icing so it looks like a cake."
I wave her off "I'll buy it," I say this only because it is 5:41 and with each passing minute I am growing desperate, also I don't want Jesse to be disappointed that I fumbled the cake and ruined his girlfriend's birthday.
Angsty teenager puts the bright blue monstrosity into a cake box and charges me an absurd total for it, I bitterly tap my card on the machine. 
As I walk back out to Ellie's car I take a brief moment to look at the sky, it's the same hue as cotton candy and looks as if it had been projected from a watercolour painting, even after I get back into the car and Ellie begins to blast her old dad rock songs, I can't tear my eyes away from it.
After five minutes of silence from my end, Ellie finally asks the question that's been burning into the forefront of her brain "Why are you being weird?"
"Why haven't you told anyone that we met before we moved in together?"
Her dark eyebrows furrow "You haven't told anyone either-
"Yes, I have."
"Who?"
"Yara, Stacy, Kayla, Mitch, Nigel, Carmen, literally everyone from my work," I admit "I just haven't told people who know you personally so it can't make its way back to you because you clearly don't want people to know."
She falls silent, searching her mind for the right words. She clutches the steering wheel tight and looks dead ahead at the car's bumper-to-bumper ahead of us. "I just know how to slip it into conversation."
"I don't think it's that hard, you can just say that we were friends, you don't need to give an intricate play-by-play of everything that happened."
"Why is it important that people know if we're cool again?"
I turn my head to slowly look at her "You are the one who always said 'If we don't have honesty, we have nothing at all'," I point out.
Silence strings between us again, I almost want to throw up.
'We're cool again' Nope, not anymore, we are so very far from cool. Instead of Ellie casting me little glances as she had on the ride there, she ignores my presence almost completely while I glare daggers at her. Was she embarrassed by me? When we went to lunch together why did she lie to Dina about where she was? When she slept in my bed why did Cat ask me if I knew why Ellie came home at eight AM with nothing, not even a key? Did she crawl through my bedroom window to walk around to the front door and pretend she was just getting home?
AND WHY DIDN'T I CALL HER OUT?
She was keeping me a secret and that realization hurt worse than any injury I had ever suffered. She hasn't even told her dead who practically raised me that we lived together. 
God, we weren't even anything and she was keeping me under wraps like I was some disgraceful secret that she would get shamed for holding. The very second she approached our house, I got out of her car, she hadn't even stopped it completely but cake in hand, I hopped out of her car door and didn't look back.
Tumblr media
I think I've had my fair share of partying.
After that month-long bender I had where I went to clubs every night and replaced food with vodka, I never wanted to even look at another solo cup full of liquor. Instead of drinking, smoking, or doing karaoke, I hide from Ellie.
I hide from her in conversations and sometimes sneak into my bedroom just to get a bit of breathing room from all of the strangers in my house. Wherever Ellie was, I was not. If she was outside, I was inside, if she was in the living room, I was in the kitchen enjoying my veggie platter. 
Have you ever been the only sober person around in a group of people? If the answer is no, have you ever babysat a houseful of toddlers? Because it's just about the same thing.
When I'm not hiding from the girl who wriggled her way back into my good graces just to trip herself off the podium, I'm cleaning up, protecting our furniture, holding back hair as girls I've never met sob into the toilet, and stopping the drunk from doing stupid things. 
"Hey, buddy," I take my can of hairspray that this frat-adjacent man is holding behind an ignited lighter "I don't think you would look good as a burn victim," His friends moan in disappointment as I do so, they were very excited to see a makeshift flamethrower; I wasn't in the mood to have my house burn down, or have a guy with peach fuzz waste my thirty dollar hair spray. 
Thirty dollars?
Note to self for later: Make smarter spending choices (And smarter relationship choices!).
I felt a tap on my shoulder only to turn around and see Dina, she wasn't drunk, just tipsy "Smile!" She holds up a camera to her eye and clicks the shudder button before I even have a chance to react the flash goes off. A large Polaroid begins to print out, Dina snatches it and shakes it until you can see my silhouette, my eyes are wide, my hair flying behind me from the quick turn of my head and I'm holding a can of hairspray angled to look like I'm going to spray the camera with it "Cute!" She smiles, tucking it into her pocket for later "Wait, I want a group picture of the roommates."
Dina takes my hand and pulls me to one of the couches where Ellie and Abby sit with some guy, she shoes him to get up and drags Cat over to replace him, she stands me in between Ellie and Abby and lightly pushes me down to sit wedged between the two.
"Jesse, please do not do me dirty with this picture," She hands the pink Polaroid camera to her boyfriend and quickly ushers herself to the far left of the couch where she bends over to kiss Cat on the cheek for the picture. Ellie and I are stiff and awkward when the flash goes off. 
After the picture is taken, Ellue turns to face me just the slightest "Hey, I think we should talk-
"I think it's time for cake!" I push myself off the couch and usher myself to the kitchen. 
I pull the cake out of the fridge, looking at what I had done to salvage it; Below the part that said 'It's a...' I wrote '21 year old!' in chocolate pre-made Betty Crocker icing that I had in the fridge for months, it didn't look the best, but it could've been worse.
Dina, of course, cackles when she sees it. To her, it is the funniest thing she's seen all night. I stick the candles in and light it with the light I confiscated from peach fuzz frat boy and push the cake towards Dina after tucking the light back into my pocket, she is illuminated in the glow of iPhone flash all filming her.
"Make a wish!"
Age Sixteen- Grade 11
I think back to how embarrassing it felt to be thoughtful.
How fragile I felt when I would share my feelings and how frail I seem when I do it now. Ellie was always tougher than I was, in rugby, in fights, just in general. That's why I figured she would be taking it better than me when I cut contact, once again I have been proven wrong.
"Conner, can we please just leave?" I pleaded with my then-boyfriend. The night had started fine but after a couple of drinks Ellie and I were becoming increasingly hostile to one another, it wasn't my intention to speak to her but the universe forced my hand when we were shoved into a circle of our friends and made to converse around the bonfire at the beach.
The salty breeze carried the sounds of laughter and the gentle crashing of waves, the scent of roasted marshmallows wafted through the air.
 "What, you need your boyfriend's permission or something?" Ellie held a can of berry blast Smirnoff, staring into my soul from the other side of the fire, the sparks glitter through the night like fireflies. Her words don't feel too bad but they don't feel too good either.
I cast her a glare before I looked back to my boyfriend "Please?" 
He is getting perpetually annoyed with me he shrugs away from my grasp, "Fuck off, we just got here," He mutters, Conner must think I couldn't hear it. He had already downed three Bud lights and a couple of shots of cheap vodka, now he is nursing another beer in hand. 
"Excuse me?" I say, narrowing my eyes. Everyone around the fire pauses their conversation to tune into mine. "Come on," I stand up and try to pull him along so we can have a conversation away from the prying eyes of our friends.
I can't pull the mass of the 6'2 quarterback along with me but he obliges and follows me where I yank him. As I drag him along the rest of the group giggle and makes jokes along the lines of 'Trouble in paradise' but Ellie is the only one who doesn't jump back into mindless conversation, her unnerving eyes are still on me while I chew my boyfriend out by the shoreline. 
"Why do I have to leave just because you're feeling a little bummed out?" 
I'm almost floored at out someone can lack so much empathy "Because you're my boyfriend?" I can feel myself tensing up.
"Why does that mean you can't get up and leave on your own?" He defends "You begged me to come here and now I just wanna down a couple of beers and hang out with my friends."
"You've already drank like twenty!" I retort.
"It's a fucking party!" Conner says, raising his voice "It's a party and it's summer and you're seriously trying to tell me not to have fun?"
"Fuck!" I shout in frustration "Why don't you ever call me? Why can't you ever let me in?" The argument is quickly escalating "Why didn't you tell me that you kissed Tamar and why haven't you told me that you love me?"
"Because I don't."
My words fail me. I knew he didn't, I knew that he hardly even liked me. My dad had thought so highly of him, she said he was the type of guy to rescue a baby from a burning building but as I look at him now, I figure that he eats babies.
I almost open my mouth to say something different, almost, but I don't. The rest of my life might have turned out differently if I didn't, I might've been able to salvage the rotting corpse of my relationship with Ellie but I didn't. "Fine," I say, voice calm and quiet "Let's stay."
Before that night I had never really gotten drunk but the second I got back to the bonfire, I was digging through the cooler and shotgunning canned Smirnoff. "Woah," Riley laughs "Someone's finally being a bad influence."
I got myself so shit-faced that when everyone else got up to dance to the music blaring through the Bluetooth speaker, I sat by myself at the shoreline, looking bitterly out towards to ocean while the tides crash at my feet and get sucked back into the ocean. For a moment I think about jumping in and letting my lax body get washed away and sink beneath the surface until I wash up as a water-bloated corpse that some nine-year-old will find when they're beach combing.
My mouth tastes like peroxide and blood, my lungs burn with a red-hot pain. The wind is becoming increasingly harsh and I ignore the hair that is tangled into my golden hoop earrings.
"Wow, you look awful," I don't need to turn around to know who it is.
"Can you just fuck off?" I say "I don't give a shit about you, just leave me alone."
She always had to antagonize me, Ellie went out of her way to stray from the group and bother me. It had something to do with the alcohol in her system. Despite her alleged hatred for me, she takes a seat next to me regardless.
"Fuck, you're so sensitive," She scoffs "I don't know why you're dating him, I'm not even sure why you'd want to fuck him unless you're too lazy to jerk off-
My hands think before my head and I deck Ellie right in the side of her face, getting a solid hit to her cheekbone. My hand flies over my mouth "I'm sorry, I-
Ellie doesn't waste any time in lunging back at me, she pushes me down by my shoulders until my back is in the shallow of the water that moments ago just splashed at my feet and takes a swing. The impact of her punch almost knocks me sober.
I take a sharp inhale, grabbing her elbows and pulling her down to where she was the one on her back and I was the one straddling her. I land one last blow to her nose, I hear a crunch and the panic immediately sends me scrambling to my feet. My eyes go wide at the blood dripping down, her face I turn to run but Ellie is faster, she grabs me by my hair and yanks me down further into the water with her. 
"Fucking cunt!" I cry, though my scream is drowned out by the overwhelmingly loud tides crashing on the shore "Get the fuck off me!" 
Ellie is better at fighting than I am, I had never been on this side of her before, usually, I had been the one to drag her away from fights but now I am the one who is going to stumble home numb from the devastating pain.
Frankly, I'm fucking scared.
She continues to drag me by my hair until I'm knee-deep in the water with her, she almost throws her entire weight into me, dunking me beneath the surface where her bony hands snake around my neck. My eyes have gone blurry with the salt water, they sting and burn. I can't see anything, all I can do is uselessly thrash beneath her. My hands push against her face, trying to pry her off my body. 
Eventually, I manage to claw her face with my fingernails, I dig deep enough that it breaks skin and she recoils just enough for me to knee her in the stomach and let me get out from under her. Just as I try to slip away she reaches for my hair again, but instead of tugging on my hair, she rips out my gold hoop earring. I screech out in agony, hand reaching for where the metal sliced through the lobe of my ear, I shudder in pain; my cries are now jagged and harsh.
This is the exact moment Ellie begins to regret what she's done. "Fuck, I'm so sorry, I didn't mean to." Her tone softens and she tries to approach me but I back away from her like a frightened dog.
"Get away from me!" Despite the pain surging in my body, I find the strength in me to hit her again, she staggers back tripping into the water. I hit her so hard that I feel a crack in my knuckle and I yelp out in the immediate shock of pain. 
I wasn't sure when the others had noticed this was happening probably because my vision had gone blurry from salt water and adrenaline but before Ellie could hit me again, she was being restrained by Riley and Kennedy while some guy who I had probably had two conversations with dragged my back to shore.
I keel over on my hands and knees and begin to start retching onto the sand. Laila rubs a gentle hand on my back, my hair sticking wet on my forehead. A seagull, disturbed by the commotion, took flight, its wings cutting through the charged air. 
Next to the pile of vomit I just heaved, blood drips down from my ear, pooling and then soaking into the sand. My neck swells from what is still the raw sensation of Ellie closing her hands around it. 
I look up at Ellie, there is blood that has dripped its way into her mouth, clinging to her white teeth. She has what almost looks like a cat scratch running down her cheek, blood begins to prick and spill from the lacerations.
She stares back at me and we don't say a word but we understand each other clearly, I never want to see you again.
Tumblr media
"Let's go," Ellie grabs my arm as Dina begins to slice the cake "We're gonna fix this right now."
"Ellie, there are so many people here," I say in a hushed tone so people can't hear me.
"I don't mean here," She looks at me, face expressionless "Just get in my car."
"Excuse me?" I say, tone accusing "Did you just order me to get in your car?"
"Fuck," She sighs, dropping my wrist to rub her hands down her face "Please can you get in my car so we can work this through."
"There's nothing to work through," I retort "You're embarrassed by me or you still secretly hate me and that's fine, I meant what I said on winter break about the lease, the second it's up, I'm getting the fuck out of here."
"What? No, don't- just," She takes a breath, reevaluating what to say "I have a point to make but I can't make it unless you get in my car."
We stare at each other for a moment, I narrow my eyes and she is still unmoving. Every scenario runs through my head of what could be waiting for me in that car.
"Fine."
I sit silently in her passenger seat, my knees are pulled into my chest and I rest my chin on them. Ellie doesn't say anything either as she drives. I watch each traffic light pass me, every street name to try and make sense of where we are going.
I almost feel like I'm going to suffocate beneath the silence of everything going left unsaid.
When I spot the boardwalk up ahead, I know exactly where she's taking me "Ellie, why are we at the beach?" I give her a side glance "Do I need to take out my earrings?"
Heat rises to her cheeks when I say this, "Not yet," She jokes, getting out of her car and grabbing a tote bag from the back seat, and I follow in tow.
We walk past the boardwalk and onto the sandy beach, I'm already not feeling whatever she's doing; there is sand filling up my Converse and a slight wind chill, I'm really wishing I had a hoodie right now. "Can you tell me what we're doing yet?" I'm hugging myself in an attempt to stay warm "If we're still walking on the beach why couldn't we have just walked on the boardwalk instead? It literally has walk in the name." I'm already going off on one of my tangents.
She still walking ahead of me but she briefly turns around to face me "Can you just stop asking questions for a minute?"
"Okay, whatever," I mutter, trailing behind her still. I can hardly see in the night, the only light to guide us is the moon and the warm ceiling lamps from restaurants along the boardwalk. I can vaguely see Ellie's silhouette, she's outlined by the gentle glow radiating off the moon, I try my best not to stumble over things poking out of the sand that have been lost to sight by darkness. 
"Okay," Ellie stops, "Here we are."
"Where are we?" I ask "I can't see shit, I don't know where here is."
Ellie digs around in her pocket for her phone and turns on a flashlight and it reveals a small iron firepit that was cemented into a slab of concrete in the sand. She hands me her phone so I can keep the flash on her and she can see what she's doing. 
She pulls out some pages ripped out from her notebook "Can you hand me your lighter?"
My eyebrows furrowed, and I felt around in my pocket wondering if I even had one. I did, it had slipped my mind that I still had the bic lighter that I confiscated from Peach Fuzz. I hand the lighter to her and watch as she tucks the pages beneath logs that were in the firepit before we arrive, they are somewhat charred but still viable.
She flicks the lighter to ignite it and the paper catches immediately. The initial flicker grew into a tentative blaze, licking at the edges of the kindling. The crackling sound echoed through the night. 
Once she is sure the fire can survive without her feeding it, she steps away. "Alright, let's have it out."
"Like sex?" I scrunch up my nose.
"Oh my god, no, like let's talk this through." She pinches her nose bridge, taking a breath in before exhaling and putting her hand back down "We're gonna recreate the night of the bonfire how it should've been," Ellie reached back into her bag and pulled out two white claws "I snagged these from Dina's party, sorry this was kind of last minute."
I can't help the smile that grows on my face, I take one of the white claws and crack it open "I don't know how authentic this is gonna be if there isn't any canned Smirnoff."
I think back to exactly how that night played out and I take a seat on the sand, facing the crashing dark ocean. I sip my white claw, as expected Ellie takes a seat next to me, just what happened on the actual night.
"Wow," She says "You look really pretty and I'm an idiot for ever saying you looked awful," Ellie looks gorgeous illuminated by the orange light of the fire, and the breeze causes her flyaway hairs to drift in the wind. "I'm an asshole for pretending that I didn't know you, I was scared I would get hurt again and take it to heart like I did last time. I promise the second we get home that I'll come clean."
I don't know if I can deal with this sugary philosophy. She's being so sweet that it's rotting my teeth.
"Ellie," I say gathering my thoughts, it was so hard being honest with my feelings, it felt like I would get hospitalized if I showed any emotion. "I was so in love with you in high school that it killed me, and I was terrified that my parents would throw me out well, they did- but that's why I pushed you away and there isn't a day that goes by where I don't regret it." 
The surprise on her face morphs into a soft smile "What about now?" she asks "Do you still love me?"
I shrug, it's honest "I dunno, but I think there's room to try."
She looks from me to the ocean and the way the moonlight glitters off the surface "What happened next?" Ellie toys with the tab of her drink "Did you hit me?"
"Yeah," I say softly, following her gaze out to the waters "But if we're doing the night how it should've been, I'd rather just kiss you."
Ellie turns her head back to look at me. She shoves her white claw into the sand then takes my face into one of her hands and kisses me like it's her job, so tender and carefully like she's afraid I will break beneath pressure.
How weak have I become? My heart is so full of her that I can hardly call it my own.
A/N: Be grateful for this ending because I was very tempted to give you guys an unhappy one. Sorry that I forgot to post this lol, I’m sad this series is over but excited to show you all my next one which may be the angst-iest yet 👀
Thanks for reading!
Tag list: @elliesaturnsoftdrink @elliesaesp @melanie-watermelon @yalaysbee @laundrybag29 @readbydayana @skylerwhitwyo @lmaoo-spiderman @joliettes @kittnii @taylorgracies @sameenatruther @mikellie @belles-hell @fullmachinegirl @eveshyper @whosmica
502 notes · View notes