#Repudiates own confession
Text
The Lost Dragon I - Ensnared.
Summary:
The Greens have repudiated the sucession and ursurped the Iron Throne. After encounting her uncle Aemond at Storms End, he kindaps Vaelys and takes her too Kings Landing - to be used as leverage against her mother.
Whilst the Greens delight in their good fortune, they fail to realise the depths of Aemond's growing feelings for Vaelys and how her presence will ultimately change the outcome of the Dance of Dragons.
Warning(s): Kidnapping, Language, Threats, Angst, Uncle/Niece Incest, Witnessed Consummation, Smut – Fingering, P in V.
AEMOND TARGARYEN x O.C -VAELYS TARGARYEN
MINORS DO NOT INTERACT.
Word Count: 4280
Disclaimer: I do not own any of the House of The Dragon or Fire & Blood characters nor do I claim to own them. I do not own any of the images used.
Comments, likes, and reblogs are very much appreciated.
“You’re lucky you didn’t kill her-how could you be so foolish” snapped Alicent.
"You only lost one eye-how could you be so blind?"
“Her dragon attacked Vhagar-“ reasoned Aemond.
“What does it matter? We have Rhaenyra’s eldest bastard in our clutches, she could prove useful,” said Aegon shrugging.
“Once Rhaenyra discovers that we have her daughter, neither she nor Daemon will rest until Vaelys is returned to them-for all we know they could descend from the skies on their dragons at any moment” urged Alicent picking nervously at her nails.
“I doubt it-None of their dragons are a match for Vhagar“ scoffed Aemond.
“Vhagar may indeed be the largest dragon in the world but even she cannot withstand a combined attack from the dragons they have-you would do well to remember that boy” said Otto sternly.
“What do you suggest?” asked Aemond through gritted teeth.
“We have the girl-we should use her to our advantage. Rhaenyra would not dare attack Kings Landing for fear of her daughters safety” explained Otto.
“Where is my niece currently?” asked Aegon.
“She was taken to the Black Cells Your Grace-“ replied Ser Criston.
“I want her brought here at once-” ordered Aegon, the crown of the conqueror slipping down his forehead.
A small group of guards shuffled out of the throne room and returned a little while later with a thoroughly drenched and bleeding Vaelys Targaryen, her wrists bound together in chains.
"Seven above-have mercy on us" muttered Alicent.
“Welcome back to Kings Landing-“ said Aegon smirking.
“I wish I could it’s nice to be back” replied Vaelys wiping her nose on her tattered sleeve.
The sound of the chains clinking echoed around the throne room.
“My deepest sympathies on the loss of your dragon” said Aegon smugly.
“You can shove your sympathy right up your arse” sneered Vaelys.
“I don’t think your language is very ladylike”.
“Like I care what you think-“ quipped Vaelys.
“I would see you bow before your King” demanded Aegon.
"King? I see no King" snarked Vaelys as she lifted her hand to her forehead and began to look around the throne room.
"I said BOW TO YOUR KING" balled Aegon.
“I bow before no King. All I see is a drunken, usurper CUNT” snarled Vaelys spitting on the floor.
“The bastard dares speak to me in such a manner” roared Aegon.
“I will speak however I please, you will not silence me you drunken wastrel-” quipped Vaelys.
“Mayhaps I should teach the bastard some respect-”.
“-I’m more Targaryen than you will ever be” snapped Vaelys.
“The bastard thinks herself more than a King” said Aegon.
“You look down your nose at me yet you’re nothing more than a half breed. Your dragons blood diluted with that of the Hightower, your nothing but a slithering green snake masquerading as a dragon”.
“Says the strong bastard” raged Aegon.
“I’m not some strong bastard who was lucky enough to favour my mother’s colouring, I am the daughter of the rogue prince himself, Daemon Targaryen” confessed Vaelys.
“WHAT?” exclaimed Alicent.
“Oh please-like you didn’t suspect such a thing” snarked Vaelys.
“How?” asked Alicent.
“On my mother’s wedding night to Ser Laenor-she lay with Daemon” replied Vaelys.
“So, you openly admit that your mother betrayed her marriage to Ser Laenor?” asked Otto.
“Can it be considered betrayal if he gave his permission?” retorted Vaelys.
“He-what?”
“Oh, come on-you know that Laenor only sought the attention of his squires, he couldn’t consummate the marriage, especially when he’d just witnessed the brutal and unnecessary murder of his beloved Joffrey at the hands of your own sworn protector-so of course Daemon was only too happy to volunteer his services” said Vaelys glaring at Ser Criston who narrowed his eyes at her.
“-And your mother was only too happy to accept” snapped Alicent.
“Surely your aware of first night rights-“
“-And what excuse can be conjured for existence of your brothers?” asked Alicent.
“-What do you intend to do with the girl Your Grace?” asked Otto, his patience wearing thin.
“We could always offer her to any of the noble lords who bend the knee and pledge their loyalty to me” mused Aegon, ignoring the look of horror plastered across the faces of his mother and grandsire.
Aemond took a deep breath and folded his arms behind his back, his gaze never leaving his brother.
“We could even leave her chained up in the throne room and they could take turns with her. How many cocks do you think she could she take before she breaks?” said Aegon.
“Your Grace-she is still a Princess of the realm” warned Otto.
“Wed her to me” offered Aemond.
“-And why would I allow such a thing to take place?” asked Aegon.
“I brought her here. She belongs to me-” replied Aemond.
“-And that’s enough of a reason?”
“If not, then mayhaps the prevention of her marriage to Cregan Stark is” said Aemond firmly.
“Stark?” asked Otto.
“Borros Baratheon inquired about her hand in marriage-he seemed interested in taking her to wife, boldly declaring that she would give him many sons, but she refused. It seems her bastard brother has flown to Winterfell and delivered terms in exchange for his support” said Aemond.
“We cannot allow such a match-if Stark honours his father’s oath and bends the knee the rest of the North will follow, we must intervene if we are too secure-“ urged Otto.
“-There isn’t a Stark alive that’s ever broken an oath-you’ve already lost the North and my grandmother was an Arryn, the Eyrie won’t turn against their kin-” said Vaelys smirking.
“-But we still have you” declared Aegon boldly.
“Your Grace-“ questioned Otto.
“-As you were saying brother-you believe that she belongs to you?” mused Aegon.
“There is a debt to be paid and I will take her as payment for the eye her bastard brother carved from my skull”.
“Her maiden head in exchange for your eye? Assuming of course that she is still a maid, after all she is the daughter of a whore” quipped Aegon smirking.
"The only whore I see is YOU" yelled Vaelys.
"Hold your tongue-or I will have it removed" snarled Aegon.
Vaelys was about to answer back, but then she caught Aemond's eye, and he discreetly shook his head.
Deciding it was better to keep quiet, Vaelys lowered her gaze to the floor.
“I will have her as my wife and I will take what is mine” said Aemond, his voice firm and unwavering.
“And when her maidens blood stains your cock. What then?” asked Aegon.
“She will still have her uses” replied Aemond firmly.
“Very well brother. You may take her to wife” said Aegon smirking at the look on Vaelys’ face.
“Your Grace, Aemond has already agreed to marry one of Borros Baratheon’s daughters, he pledged his support to you based on that promise” urged Alicent.
“Offer Daeron’s hand instead. I don’t really think it matters which Prince marries his daughter” replied Aegon shrugging.
“But Your Grace-“ said Alicent.
“-My brother’s debt will be paid” said Aegon firmly.
Just as Alicent was about to respond, her father shook his head and she sighed despondently, Aegon had clearly made his mind up and now her favoured son would be stuck with a bastard for a bride instead of someone more worthy of his station.
“If some of the lords who have declared for Rhaenyra see that her daughter is wed to Aemond, we may be able to sway them to our side” said Otto thoughtfully.
“Exactly-now take your bastard Aemond and see that she is made presentable-you will wed on the morrow, mother will make the arrangements” ordered Aegon.
“Your Grace” muttered Alicent through gritted teeth.
“YOU-“ snapped Vaelys taking a step forward only to be stopped by Aemond.
“Ser Arryk-Escort my betrothed to her temporary chambers, ensure that she is bathed, and that cut is taken care of” said Aemond sternly.
“Yes, my Prince” replied Ser Arryk.
“You may also want to have the chains removed as well?” suggested Otto.
“Hmm” rasped Aemond.
“Cunt” snapped Vaelys.
“Careful niece-come tomorrow, my brother will have other uses for that mouth of yours” said Aegon smirking.
“Then he will find himself without his cock” replied Vaelys as Ser Arryk lead her out of the throne room.
After she had been thoroughly bathed, Vaelys was sat on a chair under the watchful eye of Ser Arryk waiting for Maester Orwyle to arrive.
“Do you not wish to enquire about the wellbeing of your brother?” asked Vaelys as she watched the maids busying themselves with tidying up.
“I’m sure my brother is fine” muttered Arryk solemnly, his eyes fixed upon the door.
“You know it amazes me how different twins can be. I mean there’s Erryk who is loyal, and then there’s you-“ said Vaelys.
“-My brother is a traitor” said Arryk.
“Your brother swore towards the rightful Queen-he is a man of honour, unlike some I could mention” said Vaelys, a soft knock at the door diverting her attention away from her guard.
“Prince Aemond” said Arryk bowing slightly.
“You can wait outside-“
Ser Arryk nodded his head slightly and then shuffled out of the room, only to come to a standstill just beyond the threshold of the door.
“He is to be your personal guard-he will remain stationed outside, so before you get any ideas, remember he’s there” said Aemond as he waved his hand, and a nervous looking maid placed a stool in front of Vaelys.
“What are you doing?”
“The cut needs stitching, I’ve stitched plenty of my own wounds before, or would you rather have the Maester do it, after all he did such a wonderful job on my eye” said Aemond.
“I thought it was Maester Selkin who stitched your eye?“ asked Vaelys.
“On Driftmark-but I’ve had other procedures since then” replied Aemond.
“Other procedures?”
“Removal of my eyelids” said Aemond as he threaded the needle and raised his hand to Vaelys who flinched away nervously.
“I-I-“ stuttered Vaelys.
“If I was going to hurt you, then I would have done it before I brought you to Kings Landing”.
“But you did hurt me-you killed my dragon” whispered Vaelys softly as she leaned forward an allowed Aemond to begin stitching the cut above her eye.
“I’m sorry about Archonei-” whispered Aemond.
“-Don’t say her name” snapped Vaelys.
“It was not my intent to kill her”.
“You chased after us on that old bitch dragon of yours, what did you think was going to happen?” quipped Vaelys, grimacing as Aemond pulled the thread through her skin.
“Vhagar was defending me after your dragon attacked her”.
“Archonei was frightened, she was much smaller than Vhagar, how would you feel having that thing chasing after you” said Vaelys.
“If you didn’t insult me in the first place then I wouldn’t have chased after you”.
“I heard you-shouting your commands, but she wouldn’t listen. Does your King know that you can’t control your dragon?” asked Vaelys flinching again as the needle pierced her skin.
“It was a momentary lapse in-“
“-Your mouldy rock is obviously getting senile in her old age” retorted Vaelys.
Aemond paused for a moment, debating with himself on whether or not he would engage Vaelys in the argument she was intent on starting, but after a few moments he decided against it.
“We are to marry on the morrow-I suggest you rest well” muttered Aemond as he tied the thread and snipped it.
“If you think that I’d willingly marry you dragon slayer, then your even stupider than you look”.
“The alternative is much worse-“ muttered Aemond raising from the stool.
Vaelys looked at Aemond and took a deep breath, she knew Aegon’s threat of offering her to any Lords who bent the knee was not an empty one and despite her anger towards Aemond for what he had done, he was clearly the lesser of two evils.
She would rather be his wife, than suffer the alternative. Her fathers words echoed in her mind ‘Seize your opportunity and do what you must in order to survive’.
“Fine. I will marry you” snapped Vaelys.
“Get some rest Princess. Tomorrow you will be my wife” replied Aemond as he turned on his heel and left the room.
Aemond was stood beside the high septon. He was elegantly dressed, his black tunic decorated with silver dragons and his Targaryen cloak tied loosely around his shoulders. His long hair tied back in its usual half up, half down style.
The horns signalled the beginning of the ceremony and begrudgingly Vaelys took Aegon’s arm.
“You look beautiful. Green suits you” said Aegon smugly.
“Eat shit-” muttered Vaelys.
“Thank you for escorting the bride Your Grace. If you would be so kind as to wait for the Princess to remove her maiden cloak” said the Septon.
Vaelys undid the ties of her maiden cloak and handed it to Aegon who nodded respectfully to the Septon and took his seat next to Alicent and Helaena.
“You may now cloak the bride and bring her under your protection” said the Septon loudly.
Aemond removed the cloak bearing the colours of house Targaryen and draped it around Vaelys’ shoulders.
Aemond then took Vaelys’ hand and smiled as the Septon tied their hands together by a ribbon.
“In the sight of the seven, I hereby seal these two souls, binding them as one, for eternity. Now you may look upon one another and say these vows together” exclaimed the Septon.
“Father, Smith, Warrior, Mother, Maiden, Crone, Stranger. I am his and he is mine from this day until the end of my days” said Vaelys, her lip wobbling slightly.
“Father, Smith, Warrior, Mother, Maiden, Crone, Stranger. I am hers and she is mine from this day until the end of my days” declared Aemond loudly.
“The vows have been spoken. You may kiss your bride”.
Aemond hesitated for a moment before he leaned forward and pressed a gentle kiss to Vaelys’ lips.
“ñuhon” whispered Aemond as he pulled away (Mine).
The celebration after their wedding was in full swing, how Alicent had managed to pull this off in the limited time she had, Vaelys didn’t want to know.
King Aegon was sat at the head of the table, with a smiling Alicent and Otto by his side.
Vaelys sat next to Aemond near the head of the table, plastering on a smile as Lords and ladies loyal to Aegon came up to wish them well. Tyland Lannister, and one that seemed to linger, Jasper Wylde.
"Many good wishes too you Prince Aemond and Princess Vaelys. A match many shall pray for a fruitful outcome. I must admit Princess, the tales of your great beauty have not been exaggerated".
Vaelys shifted uncomfortably in her seat and Aemond scowled.
"Thank you," nodded Vaelys politely.
All through the feast and dancing, Vaelys couldn’t help but think about her mother.
Did her mother know that she was in Kings Landing? Or had the broken pieces of Archonei been discovered and it was assumed that she had died alongside her dragon?
Her mother was still recovering from the pain and loss of her last pregnancy when she had agreed to let Vaelys fly to Storms End, how cruel would it be to let a mother already grieving for the loss of one daughter, believe her other was also dead.
“Valzȳrys” muttered Vaelys (Husband).
“Is everything ok?” asked Aemond.
“Issa muñā, does she know that I’m here?” (My mother).
“I don’t know-I’ll asked my grandsire” replied Aemond as he rose from his seat and made his way towards his grandsire who was in conversation with Larys Strong.
“Does Rhaenyra know that her daughter is here?” asked Aemond.
“The Princess has not yet been informed of-“ said Otto.
“-She’ll know when she receives the sheets stained with her daughter’s maiden’s blood” interrupted Aegon.
“Perhaps a letter would be sufficient-” mused Aemond.
“No-our whore sister will be sent proof that her daughter has been wedded and bedded. Speaking of which I must inform you brother that the consummation will need to be witnessed, given our older sisters past behaviours”.
“Your Grace-“ exclaimed Aemond.
“We cannot have Rhaenyra contesting the marriage-“ urged Larys.
“Lord Strong is right-“ said Otto.
As much as he could try an argue against it, Aemond knew couldn’t. Rhaenyra would indeed challenge the validity of her daughters marriage, and the witnesses were a preventative measure.
“I request the minimum number of witnesses and sheer curtains-“
“Arrangements will be made,” said Otto.
“Your no fun” muttered Aegon tipping a large gulp of wine.
“I do not wish for my wife to be displayed in such a manner” snapped Aemond.
“Careful brother-anyone would think that you care for the bastard” snarked Aegon.
“She is my wife-“ said Aemond.
“-And that little crush of yours has nothing to do with it?”
“I don’t know what your talking about” snarled Aemond.
“I saw that cuntstruck look on your face when our sister brought her brood of bastards to the Red Keep defending Jace’s claim to Driftmark-Couldn’t keep your eye off our niece, although I must say I don’t blame you. She has grown rather beautiful. Perhaps I’ll take a leaf out of our uncles book and insist on first night rights” said Aegon.
“You have no right” replied Aemond, his heart pounding in his chest.
“I am the King-I have every right, but what sort of brother would I be if I deprived you of the chance to deflower a maid-it’s not as if the last woman you bedded was one” laughed Aegon.
“Don’t ever mention that again” ordered Aemond as he turned on his heel and returned to Vaelys who was now huddled with Helaena.
“I couldn’t talk him out of it-” said Aemond.
“At least you tried” muttered Vaelys, her shoulders slumping.
“Come good sister-I shall escort you to your new chambers” whispered Helaena.
“I’ll distract Aegon and the others” muttered Aemond.
“I know it might not make sense, but it was necessary for Aemond to bring you here”.
“I’m sure it was-“ muttered Vaelys as she watched Aemond bump into his brother, causing the cup of wine he was holding to spill all over the floor.
“You will see in time, and don’t worry you will fly again,” said Helaena.
“I will?” asked Vaelys as she followed Helaena out of the throne room.
“A dragon across the sea, a bronze heart waiting to be free,” said Helaena.
“What?” exclaimed Vaelys.
“A dragon across the sea, a bronze heart waiting to be free,” repeated Helaena as she came to a stop in the middle of the corridor.
“These are not my chambers” mused Vaelys.
“No-there Aemonds. You are to share, it’s important” muttered Helaena as she pushed open the door, took Vaelys by the hand and pulled her inside.
“I’m scared” whimpered Vaelys.
“Aemond will take care of you-he’s not the monster you think he is,” said Helaena.
“He brought me here”.
“I was necessary-a dragon across the sea, a bronze heart waiting to be free. The dragons begin to dance, blood will be shed, begins when two are wed,” said Helaena.
“You keep saying that but-“ uttered Vaelys as the door swung open and Aemond walked in, closely followed by Aegon, Otto, Larys Strong, Tyland Lannister and Maester Orwyle.
“It’s time-“ declared Aegon brightly.
“Will you stay?” asked Vaelys.
“Yes” replied Helaena softly as she stood next to Aegon who huffed impatiently at Aemond who was stood silently observing Vaelys.
“Would you help me with the gown, husband?” asked Vaelys as she turned from him and swept her hair away from her back to reveal a great number of fiddly buttons and laces.
“Of course,” replied Aemond as he reached forward and began undoing his wife’s wedding gown.
Soon she was stood in nothing but a thin shift and Aemond felt his heart quicken in his chest at the sight of her nipples through the sheer fabric.
He was no maid, Aegon had seen to that when he’d dragged him to the street of silk on his thirteenth name day. But Vaelys was no paid whore, that would whisper sweet lies into his ear and make him feel dirty.
She was his wife, and he would treat her as such.
Aemond began pulling off his own clothes as Vaelys climbed into the bed. Her cheeks tinged pink as she glanced nervously at the witnesses who were silent.
“Focus on me. Not them” said Aemond as he finished undressing himself and climbed into the bed.
Vaelys nodded nervously as Otto moved forward and closed the sheer curtains, they didn’t provide much privacy, but it was better than nothing.
“I-I’m ready husband” whispered Vaelys as she pulled off her shift and discarded it on the floor.
Vaelys laid down and smiled shyly as Aemond gazed at her naked body.
“Gevie” whispered Aemond as he slowly reached out and ran his fingers over Vaelys’ breasts (Beautiful).
Goosebumps erupted over Vaelys’ skin as Aemonds hand began to move lower.
“I-I need to prepare you” whispered Aemond.
“P-prepare me?” whispered Vaelys.
“I don’t want to hurt you” replied Aemond.
Vaelys gasped when she felt Aemond’s fingers rubbing her folds.
“Aemond” exclaimed Vaelys as her husband slipped a finger inside her.
Aemond buried his face in his wife’s neck as he began peppering kisses along her smooth skin as he added another finger to prepare her as best, he could.
But in the back of his mind, he was still aware of the witnesses standing at the foot of the bed.
“Come on. Get on with it” groused Aegon.
Aemond removed his fingers and then laid between his wife’s open legs, supporting his weight on his left arm as he reached down and took his hard cock in his hand and placed the tip of it against his wife’s slick entrance.
Vaelys shut her eyes tight and took a deep breath as Aemond sheathed himself within her.
“Listen to her whimpering, who would have thought a whore’s daughter would be so cock shy” laughed Aegon.
“Don’t listen to them-I won’t let them see you” muttered Aemond softly.
Vaelys couldn’t stifle the whimper of pain as she felt Aemond’s cock press further into her.
“That’s it Aemond fuck her harder” exclaimed Aegon gleefully.
“Your doing so well-” muttered Aemond trying to control himself.
Vaelys’ cunny choked his cock so tight that he needed a few seconds to adjust, making him terribly aware that he was not going to last for too long.
Aemond’s cock twitched and throbbed with need, and he released a shuddered breath while Vaelys sighed in relief.
“The pain will ease,” rasped Aemond, waiting for his wife to adjust.
After a few moments, Vaelys nodded slowly her hands grasping the white sheets tightly as Aemond pulled back and thrust forward again.
Aemond rested his head in the crook of Vaelys’ neck as he thrusts faster, his quiet moans muffled against her skin.
“Your perfect-“ whispered Aemond.
Feeling a spark of pleasure Vaelys let go of the sheets and slowly placed her hands on Aemond’s back, holding him close as his movements become more erratic.
Aemond pushed into the hilt for one last time and groaned loudly as his cock throbbed and he spilled his seed.
“A-Are you ok?” Aemond as he gently pulled his softened cock from his wife.
Vaelys nodded, her fingers digging into the fabric of the bed.
Aemond pulled the bedcovers over Vaelys and then moved to sit on the edge of the bed, his eye drawn to the red ring of Vaera’s maidens blood that now stained his cock.
“Are you well Princess. Do you need me to examine you?” asked Maester Orwyle.
“No, I’m-“ muttered Vaelys.
“-The marriage has been consummated. Get out” snapped Aemond.
“The sheets brother” said Aegon.
Aemond slowly ran a hand over his face before he jumped off the bed, his eye moving to Vaelys who clutched the bedcovers too her chest and slowly lifted her body from the bed allowing him to pull the sheet from under her.
“There-“ snarled Aemond as he threw the sheet towards Aegon.
“I see she was a maid after all” quipped Aegon as he examined the blood stained sheet.
“This will do nicely, I’ll make sure to send it to our sister on the morrow, confirming that her precious heir has been wedded and bedded” Aegon as he quickly rolled up the bloodstained sheet.
“You’ve got what you wanted now get out” retorted Aemond.
There was a brief shuffling off feet, before the door to their chambers opened and closed, leaving the two of them alone.
“Are you ok?” asked Aemond as he climbed back into the bed.
“I’m fine” whispered Vaelys.
“We should get some sleep-it’s been a long day” said Aemond as he laid down,
“W-Will you hold me. Please?” asked Vaelys her voice small and barely audible, the tears running down her face.
Aemond slowly nodded and reached towards Vaelys pulling her trembling body against his.
It took far longer than Aemond would have liked for his wife’s trembling to cease, but eventually she fell asleep with her face pressed against his chest.
After discarding his eyepatch on the nightstand, Aemond gazed at Vaelys for seemed like hours.
He could still see the faint tracks of dried tears on her face, and with a shaking hand he reached out and gently stroked her cheek.
“I’m sorry” whispered Aemond as he pulled her closer and closed his eye.
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[Bucky Barnes] set of 2 - part 12
AN: hello there! i shoul've post this on christmas but life got in the way ;) anyway, hope you like it
“I know a lot of your quiets.
"Quiets?"
"Yeah. Usually, I can tell some of them. I know when you’re alone with me and you’re quiet, it’s because your chilling, just like I do when I'm with you. Your quiet when I did something stupid, and you don't agree, but don't wanna bug me about it. Your quiet when you're tired from work or when you're pissed about something and don't want to talk about it. But I don’t know this one. What’s this one?”
You looked at him, amazed by how he could differentiate your silences. You were always a big talker, always letting everyone know your thoughts and considerations, and you were like that with him too, but with Bucky, you learned to shut the hell up a little bit and listen. In the beginning, he didn't say much, at all. With more time, he began to share a little about himself and express some interest in your life: asking how your day was, if your kitchen knives were sharp, and if you wanted him to sharpen them for you. He asked about how your door made that squeaking noise when you opened it up and if you wanted him to fix it for you. He told you about Sam's ridiculous jokes or about how annoying he was. He even told you one day about one of his nightmares: you, him and Sam were in your living room watching some movie and the three of you fell asleep. Bucky woke up from his short sleep, and you and Sam were dead, and his hand was bloodied. He had killed you and Sam, and there was nothing he could do. There was no way to bring you back.
He talked to you about Steve and how much he missed his best friend. About how much he hated this age, and one day he confessed about his consideration of ending his own life once. He wasn't supposed to be alive by now. This was not his time. His time has passed. But he had things to do. Ties for mending. Peace to be made. People who needed closure. Living a miserable life would have to do. Until he met you.
With your quick words and quicker reactions, Bucky liked how you seemed to not repudiate him right away. Not even when you recognized who he was or what he had done. Yes, he checked his entire background to see what kind of person wouldn't be surprised by a killer like him, but nothing came up. You had a clean record. Average grades in elementary and high school, no college, ordinary jobs with even more ordinary pay, and a history of boyfriends that bordered on pathetic because they were so boring. SHIELD really knew things, my goodness.
After making sure you weren't a monster like him, Bucky became even more intrigued. You seemed to like having him around. At first, he expected you to ask about all the Avengers, about the building where he stayed, and about the horrors he had seen. And also done. But you didn't ask any of that. Instead, you asked a million questions about what he didn't yet know about this new world: the new music he missed, the incredible films in color and 4K, cinema, food that was now being delivered… it was a new world, and he didn't seem to know anything about it. Nothing about the positive sides.
You talked too much, and he loved it. Bucky became even more intrigued when he began to notice how you began to mold yourself into his style. How you started to enjoy the silences like he did too. The chances of Bucky becoming a talker were almost zero, but if he could do it for anyone, it would be you. You brought hope that this terrible, cold, clueless, cruel and miserable world could still be good. That it could still be patched up. The world was good because you were in it. And it's good that he's alive to live in this era.
"Doll? What is this one?", he asked, bringing you back from your thoughts, his piercing blue eyes on you.
"This is me being upset, Buck", you confessed. "I'm so happy that you're in front of me right now, but I'm still upset with you. For always giving up on me first. For always making decisions and giving the excuse that it is in my best interests. You don't seem to know me. You know my silences, and you know so much about me, but you have no idea what I value most. I told you that I am aware that I am ridiculously ordinary, and when you act like this, when you push me away, I feel like I am being nullified. As if my opinion didn't matter. You know me, but you can't read my thoughts, so I'll clarify them for you: I love you.", You stared at him. "I love you, and it's more than just like a friend, and I feel so cringe right now that I could die, but you can't seem to get the hint, so I'll be clear as day about that. It took me a while to understand exactly what I was feeling, but I finally understood. I felt like an idiot for going after you when you have this terrible tendency to avoid me. I kept asking myself, "Why the hell am I doing this? Why can't I let this idiot go? Why can't I be content with being your friend in a distant way? Why am I thinking about his eyes on me? Why does he look at me like that? Like he loved me? I thought a lot, Buck. And I can't let you go. And I'm not going to be a hypocrite and say that you don't need to love me back. You may not admit it out loud, but I know you love me. You act like you love me. You look at me like you love me, and you take care of me like you love me. See? I can't shut the fuck up, but you love me anyway. I can see."
Bucky grinned. Huge. And he looked at you with his blue eyes from head to toe, as if he were memorizing every detail of you in his mind, the smile never leaving his face. A happy, childish smile that made you feel like his heart was going to explode out of his chest.
"I never understood the concept of the expression falling in love before, but I did it with you. When I first saw you, I felt like I had stomped on my own feet and fallen on my face without any protection. I felt like my teeth were knocked out, and my face got all scratched.", the soldier could see the clear confusion splattered on your face. "I wasn't prepared for you to walk into my life, doll. I felt deficient, surprised, and confused, and I didn't think love could make someone feel like this. If I'm being honest, I still don't feel prepared at all. I'm afraid to you in my hands and end up breaking you.", he confessed. "You know my past and what I did, and I should be far away from you, but I can't. I just can't. It's painful when my mind tries to convince me I don't deserve you, but I love you with my life. I love you like I've never loved anyone else."
"Good, because you're getting rid of me that easy. And you can fall as much as you want.", you smirked at him.
“You’ll catch me, right?”, Bucky asked.
“Always. Merry Christmas, idiot.”
"Merry Christmas, Doll."
Tag list: @almosttoopizza @creat0r-cat @aesthetic0cherryblossom @cjand10 @sapphirebarnes @nouk1998 @unaxv @rain-lavender-rain @winterslove1917 @marvel-wifey-86 @literaryavenger @kandis-mom
#bucky barnes x female reader#bucky barnes x reader#bucky barnes x oc#bucky barnes x y/n#bucky barnes fluff#bucky barnes x you#bucky barnes#bucky fic recs#bucky fic#fluff bucky#bucky texts#bucky x female reader#bucky x y/n#bucky fics#bucky x you#bucky x reader
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can i get 28 and natsume? thanks >_<
〈gn!reader x sakasaki natsume ❇〉
a/n: listened to temptation magic on repeat while writing this hehe thanks for requesting, i hope you enjoy!
kiss meme !!
28. One person tracing the other’s lips with a fingertip until they can’t resist any longer, tilting their chin towards them for a kiss.
What if the protagonist’s fairy godfather wanted them to see him as their destiny rather than some faraway prince who falls in love without knowing the protagonist’s heart and soul? Rapt with adoration, the godfather watches over them while granting their vibrant wishes in hopes to see a smile blossom on their face.
All while knowing that this fairytale had no happy ending for him.
“Ah, Kitten♪ What a coincidenCE” Natsume’s velvety greeting stirred you into gazing up from the notes you were reviewing one last time. “Where are you headED?”
“Hello, Natsume-kun! I need to submit this report to Tenshouin-senpai. Tsukinaga-senpai completely forgot to complete it, so I helped him out and I’m on my way now,” you elucidated, “Is it alright if I stop by your little hiding room later? I have something I’d like to ask you.”
Interest carved itself on his face as he raised a brow, curiously asking, “Are you finally asking me OUT? My answer has always been yES♪”
You shook your head, staving off the wavelets of embarrassment by clutching your papers up to your face. “N-Nothing like that! Can I count on you to be there?”
There was no chance Natsume would let you down—he was pretty intrigued by what you needed him for, too—and as he watched you bow your head and dash over to the student council room, he wondered if you’d still have that kind of energy for him.
——Copious wisps of purple and green fumes enveloped Natsume’s occupied hidden space by the time you gently rapped against the door for entry. You weren’t unused to inhaling the sorcery Natsume produced, rather you were effortlessly able to address him before striding on over to a chair.
“Welcome, Kitten; if you don’t mind waiting, I’d like to finish this concoction firST. Or you can talk as I woRK,” Natsume, who didn’t glance up from his bottles, said.
You vacillated whether to inquire now or not; there was a favor you only felt you could ask him to do for you, but it was pretty sensitive… Still, you supposed you made it this far, why delay the inevitable? In this case, you could ask him without having his enchanting eyes staring into your own.
“I don’t mind, I’ll go ahead and ask,” you started, gaze transfixed on Natsume’s back—his lapcoat fluttering with his movements, causing a flood of butterflies in your stomach. “Would you be willing to help me apply lip-gloss? On myself, of course.”
Natsume’s shoulders stiffened at your bold, unexpected question. “Do I look like I wear any more make-up than necesSARY? I don’t have any to give yOU,” Natsume gave a staid response, hoping to steady the confusion swirling in his mind.
Why were you suddenly interested in this? You always dressed more plainly, not adding anything more than the basics to your appearance. Even if he believed you were perfect the way you were, Natsume would never repudiate an opportunity for magic; your chance to bestow a glamorous spell onto yourself.
“No, no, I have my own I want to try! I just know I’m going to mess up putting it on by myself, so…”
Your sheepish voice was so cute and enticing, it made Natsume almost unable to concentrate on his work. “I’ll help yOU, Kitten. Don’t worRY.” But he couldn’t disrupt the progress, so he devotedly maneuvered himself into finishing up before his thoughts melted into you and only you.
Lifting a vial up into the air, watching the bewitching essence spiral within, Natsume held a pleased smile. And he took this final chance to ask, “What’s the occasiON? For the lip-glOSS.”
“I want to charm someone’s heart into becoming mine,” you confessed truthfully, yet still keeping it vague. You couldn’t outright tell him who it was, not right now.
That ambiguity was also unforeseen from you, you who was always honest to a fault (how many times have you corrected him on that you two weren’t dating?). “Aren’t you full of surprises todAY, Kitten,” Natsume wondered aloud whilst setting down his vial and removing his protective goggles.
Pulling up a chair in front of you, Natsume settled in as his knees bumped with yours from the propinquity. Having him so close to you now had your heart palpitating, and you hurriedly delved into your bag and fished out the infamous lip-gloss.
“Here, Natsume-kun. Thank you,” you expressed your gratitude softly, handing it over to him.
You immediately had to shut your eyes, incapable of further looking at him due to the swell of heat in your cheeks. You knew it was visible on your face, how apprehensive you were, but there was nothing else you could do at this point.
Natsume examined the bottle, perusing the words ‘sparkling milkyway’ as the contents within. It didn’t say anything about flavor or anything else. Unscrewing the cap, Natsume could already see specks of glitter adorning the fine brush.
Lithe fingers slid under your chin to keep you in place, and Natsume wordlessly began spreading the lip-gloss over your lips. This was probably an effort made for someone else, someone other than him, his insecurities told him.
The thought made his heart ache, and yet Natsume continued to help you—absolutely beguiled with how your trembling lips responded and twitched to his motions. “Ah, shit, I missED” Natsume cursed lowly under his breath.
Without ruminating on it, Natsume impulsively reached forward and used his finger to swipe at the overflow dripping from the corner of your lips. He salvaged what he could, now using his fingertip to trace along the shape of your lips to proportion and clean up the gloss embellishing your insanely adorable lips.
The vivid glitter dotted over the shine of the gloss itself made Natsume’s stomach jump, the sensation looping in on itself as temptation corrupted his pure intentions. Before he knew it, Natsume was shifting his mouth closer to yours.
You were so irresistible—his heart had already belonged to you since he first met you, and this mysterious spell you were casting was affecting him worse than expected.
All of a sudden, Natsume found your hands clasping his cheeks and pulling him into you. Your lips pressed against his, rounding passionately and savoring the diminutive squeak that leapt from his throat out of surprise.
When you disconnected your mouth from his, there was an alluring pop sound resounding in the room. Your deep, flushed breaths mingled together and caged you to each other.
Mischievously sticking your tongue out, noting how your glitter fused with his lips now, you admitted, “Did my magic trick work?”
Natsume’s reddened complexion was telltale of your effect over him, and he leaned his forehead against yours. “No, it didn’t—because I’ve always been YOURS,” he articulated as smoothly as he could, still feeling the fluster twisting his vocal-chords. “You… Hm, maybe I did fall for you harder, thouGH♪”
#c: sakasaki natsume#sakasaki natsume x reader#enstars x reader#ensemble stars x reader#x reader#prns: they/them#gn reader#drabbles#kiss meme#enstars
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By: Andrew Doyle
Published: Dec 12, 2023
Towards the end of Christopher Marlowe’s play Tamburlaine Part Two, our marauding anti-hero burns a copy of the Quran, along with other Islamic books, as a kind of audacious test. “Now, Mahomet,” he cries, “if thou have any power, come down thyself and work a miracle.” Two scenes later, he is dead.
We might see this as a cautionary tale for our times. After all, it isn’t only Turco-Mongol conquerors who find themselves punished for Quran-burning. Last week, the Danish parliament voted to ban the desecration of all religious texts following a spate of protests in which copies of the Qur’an had been destroyed. Inevitably, the new law has been couched as a safety measure. This burning of the book, claims justice minister Peter Hummelgaard, “harms Denmark and Danish interests, and risks harming the security of Danes abroad and here at home”.
He has a point. Even unconfirmed accusations of Quran-burning can be sufficient to prompt extremist violence. In 2015, being accused of defiling the holy book, Farkhunda Malikzada was beaten to death by a ferocious mob in Afghanistan while bystanders, including police officers, did nothing to intervene. Many filmed the brutal murder on their phones and the footage was widely shared on social media. In 2022, a mentally unstable man called Mushtaq Rajput was similarly accused and tied to a tree and stoned to death in Pakistan. Earlier this year in Iran, it was reported that Javad Rouhi was tortured so severely that he could no longer speak or walk. He was sentenced to death for apostasy and later died in prison under suspicious circumstances.
But while we might anticipate that the desecration of the Quran would be proscribed in Islamic theocracies, it is troubling to see similar laws being passed in secular nations such as Denmark. The government had not been so faint-hearted when faced with similar problems in 2005. After cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed were published in Jyllands-Posten, a global campaign from Indonesia to Bosnia demanded that the Danish authorities take action. The government stood firm and the judicial complaint against the newspaper was dismissed.
In a free society this is the only justifiable response, albeit one that takes considerable courage. And the climate of intimidation that has descended since is a product of our collective failure to defend freedom of speech against the demands of militants. When the Ayatollah Khomeini pronounced his fatwa on Salman Rushdie for his novel The Satanic Verses, one would have hoped for a unified front on behalf of one of our finest writers. Instead, much of the literary and political establishment abandoned or even censured him. In the Australian television show Hypotheticals, the singer Yusuf Islam, formerly known as Cat Stevens, implied that he would have no objections to Rushdie being burned alive.
That a work of fiction such as The Satanic Verses could not even be published today gives us some indication of the extent to which we have forsaken the principle of free speech. If we are so squeamish about the burning of Qurans, why were so many of us indifferent to the burning of Rushdie’s book on the streets of Bolton and Bradford? Yusuf Islam’s remark about the author’s immolation might have been flippant but, as Heinrich Heine famously wrote: “Where they burn books, they will in the end burn people too.”
The ceremonial burning of books in Germany and Austria in the Thirties has ensured that the act will always have a unique charge, and a disquieting, visceral effect. It is why, for instance, the most memorable scene in Mervyn Peake’s Titus Groan is when the villain Steerpike sets fire to his master’s library. It is a gesture designed to repudiate the very heights of human achievement, to hurl his victim into a spiral of despair. When Rushdie saw his own novel publicly incinerated, he confessed to feeling that “now the victory of the Enlightenment was looking temporary, reversible”.
The burning of the Quran leaves many of us similarly troubled. We do not need to approve of the contents to sense that the destruction of a book is symbolic of a desire to limit the scope of human thought. When activists post footage of themselves gleefully setting fire to copies of Harry Potter, one cannot shake the similar suspicion that they would happily substitute the books with the author herself.
But while many of us find the burning of books instinctively rebarbative, to outlaw this form of protest is essentially authoritarian. And to reinstate blasphemy laws by specifying that only religious books are to be protected is fundamentally retrograde. Of course, such laws already exist in most Western countries in an unwritten form. In March, a 14-year-old autistic boy was suspended from his school in Wakefield, reported to the police, and received death threats after he accidentally dropped a copy of the Quran on the floor, causing some of the pages to be scuffed. He may not have committed a crime, but many people behaved as though he had.
And the same unwritten laws are in force in the fact that few would be brave enough to publish cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed after the massacre at the offices of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in 2015. Five years later, the schoolteacher Samuel Paty was beheaded on the streets of Paris simply for showing the offending images during a lesson on free speech. Closer to home, a teacher at Batley Grammar School in West Yorkshire is still in hiding after showing the images to his pupils and stirring the ire of a righteous mob.
The failure of the school’s headmaster, as well as the teaching unions, to support this man against the demands of religious fundamentalists is revealing. Why must those who claim to be defending the dignity of Muslims treat them as irascible children? At the same time, as Sam Harris recently pointed out, there is an oddity in the fact that so many Muslims do not appear to be alarmed that “their community is so uniquely combustible”.
The bitter reality is that terrorism works, particularly when so many governments across the Western world are seemingly willing to fritter away our bedrock of liberal values. This has been actuated, in part, by an alliance of two very different forms of authoritarianism: ultra-conservative Islamic dogma and the safetyist ideology of “wokeness”. The latter has always claimed that causing offence is a form of violence, and the former has been quick to adopt the same tactics. This is why protesters outside Batley Grammar School asserted that the display of offensive cartoons was a “safeguarding” issue, and the Muslim Council of Britain criticised the school for not maintaining an “inclusive space”. The same censorious instincts have been updated, and are now cloaked in a more modish language.
In a civilised and pluralistic society, the burning of a holy book might provoke a variety of responses — anger, disbelief, or just a shrug of the shoulders — but it should never lead to violence. Back when The Onion still had some bite, the website satirised this “unique combustibility” through the depiction of a graphic sexual foursome between Moses, Jesus, Ganesha and Buddha. The headline said it all: “No One Murdered Because Of This Image”.
Freedom of speech and expression still matters, and if that means a few hotheads and mini-Tamburlaines might burn their copies of the Quran then so be it. It is unfortunate that we have reached the point where Islam must be ring-fenced from ridicule or criticism, whether due to fear of violent repercussions or a misguided and patronising effort to promote social justice. But for this state of affairs we ultimately have only ourselves to blame, and in particular our tendency to capitulate to religious zealots when they seek exemption from the liberal consensus.
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#Andrew Doyle#blasphemy#blasphemy laws#quran burning#quran#islam#islamic authoritarianism#authtoritarianism#i'm offended#offended#religious authoritarianism#free speech#freedom of speech#freedom of expression#criticism of islam#religion#religion is a mental illness
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“ i’ll be here. when you’re ready to talk. ”
more prompts for your feels.
'Will you? You did not seem too eager to truly hear what I had to say back then. You did not even give me a chance.' And the next thing he knew, Diluc's divine punishment was his to receive. Perhaps a cue for him to start atoning for his sins.
That is what goes through his mind as Diluc presents his pitiful attempt at commiseration. Although he wishes to let his true feelings transpire, he finds ( with great difficulty ) a will powerful enough to yet again veil his inner thoughts. With how much frequency does this occur...? He has lost count.
...Does he even possess the right to blame Diluc for his own anger and heartbreak? Although such feelings still linger, he often has to call himself to reason: no, he does not. Kaeya must side with the redhead and admit that the timing had been atrocious. Everything that day had been awful. And yet... Yet his selfish, guilt-ridden self had succumbed to his own need of coming clean. His confession had taken priority over Diluc's own feelings. Kaeya did not give him the time, the space, or the support Diluc had required. An amateur mistake, howbeit it seems that it is a vicious circle Kaeya often finds himself in.
Even now, he is being selfish about the entire ordeal. Diluc had interpreted his words as pure betrayal, the accusation loud and clear, although words had not been needed. But in Kaeya's mind, he had been trying to do the exact opposite --- he had tried to show Diluc that he trusted him. He had wished to come clean, he had wished to confide in Diluc, he had wished that Diluc would love him for who he truly was. And all he met was outright rejection and abandonment. Diluc had repudiated Kaeya's entire existence and then left. For years. And that had seemed like an eternity.
What guarantees him that the pattern will not once again repeat itself in the weaves of destiny? No. He refuses to even consider that option. He cannot bear to witness; to live through it ever again.
A shrug of arms, lips curving upward, disposition calculated. He always has to carefully think about how he presents himself. He has to have control.
«Worry not, Master Diluc. My life is not as tragic for me to pour my heart out to you». An obvious lie that both are aware of. But why bother? Kaeya refuses to open up again. He is so heavily afraid of what will happen if he does. And he does not wish to cause Diluc any more concern. Or pain. Or anger.
Offering nothing else in response, he brushes off the figurative helping hand Diluc extends.
#{{ ragbros: a vicious circle of 'I feel so guilty to have caused him harm; it can be hard to face him' and also --- }}#{{ 'still; how could he ever have done this to me???? How could he... betray me like this....' }}#{{ it really goes both ways. }}#{{ We love!!!! complicated relationships!!! in this house!!!! }}#dilucisms#【 ic | fool you once; fool you twice. 】
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Random reactions to 3Hopes spoilers under the cut.
Just spent the last 1.5hrs clutching a plushie and watching spoiler cutscenes to 3Hopes. I wonder if I just watched someone with an advanced copy of 3Hopes, since it releases tomorrow, or if I was watching an English version from someone in Europe who's a few timezones ahead, or if the Demo really went all the way to the end of Part 1 of the story. o.O?
That last part, really got to me. Not just that Claude had to kill his brother Shahid, when Claude's whole ethos is for people to come to some kind of understanding and acceptance or at least tolerance of each other, rather than killing each other. But after defeating Shahid a 2nd time, Claude felt he had to kill him. I don't know why he couldn't just take him prisoner, at least for the sake of adhering to his ideals of working out compromise and understanding between people, even if it took lots of time and work, or at least to adhere to his ideals that people shouldn't kill each other just because they have differences. Maybe it would have just incited an Almyran rescue-army to retrieve Shahid and perpetuate more war? Not taking the non-lethal path, repudiating his own ideals, must have really hurt Claude. You could hear it in his voice during the victory party. He had that same tone in FE3H while looking at the stars, asking Byleth to "talk with me for a while?", and confessing to feeling helpless/hopeless/alone. ;~;!!! I'm sure it hurts Claude, chips away at his Hope, each time he has to kill someone, rather than adhere to his ideals of people talking things out, coming to understanding and tolerance of each other, people overcoming their differences, and getting along. After all, the only reason he's survived with his goodness in tact, without becoming bitter and vengeful towards the world, is because he resolved to dream in a better world and maintain hope in others, for everyone's potential to work out their differences, understand, and accept each other. Claude can't stamp that Hope out so lightly, without trampling on his own will to survive/live. Maybe Shahid was too much a liability, in either his resolve to kill Claude or spill his secrets? But reasons for liability like that, shouldn't be enough for Claude to trample on his own ideals that feed his Hope. I wonder if he's sad because some part of him realizes that, even after the decision he made at the time to kill Shahid, was to put more weight in protecting himself from Shahid's threat, rather than adhering to his ideals. It really makes Claude's line from the 3Hopes trailers and that Shahid-killing scene even more ominous. If Claude resolves to see "hesitation to kill opposition" as a "mistake" that "now that I know, I won't make the same mistake again", then how much will Claude's ability to compromise with others erode? How much will he stop trying to work with others to understand him and resolve their differences, in favor of ending things with violence/death instead? Will Claude be able to maintain his Hope in other's potential for cooperation/goodness? Will he go down a slippery slope of killing threats instead of working with opposition, until differences are resolved? He's already become king of Leicester. Will he stop working with others altogether? Even Arval and Shez have noted that they may never get through his emotional defensive wall. If Claude never opens up, as he did after that year at the Academy and interactions with Byleth, what if he gives up on his dreams of fostering openness between people, for understanding differences and tolerance of diversity?
For a long time now, I've worried that 3Hopes will all have bad endings, to justify winding back time, so that Shez can disappear as was "destined", and Byleth can take their place in Fodlan's unification history. I keep worrying that something will push Claude in the wrong directions, so that his dreams and talk of unifying people, "erasing borders", and allyship, will morph into conquest and absorbing Fodlan into Almyra or Almyra into Fodlan. The same philosophy to make Fodlan and Almyra become one nation, instead of allowing them to maintain their differences, could slip into homogeneity, rather than an appreciation of diversity. But maybe I'm catastrophizing again. I hope so. I don't want Claude to give up on his dream, and allow his hope in others to erode away. A ruler who only feels secure when all other people are under his rule, will do nothing but try to conquer EVERYONE, all nations, because no other nation independent of his would be allowed to exist. o_o
Otherwise, I really enjoyed finally seeing Nader and Holst being sworn-brothers. They were really funny. Plus, now Hilda can have 2 overbearing brothers. LOL
And the way Claude was able to explain how he knew Nader without giving up his secret, even then, was impressive. Even Lorenz mostly bought it. ^_^
I also watched the paralogue confirming what we all suspected about Raphael's parents' deaths. We got a little more verification that it was Count Gloucester's doing. He hired the mercenaries that ultimately killed Raphael's parents and Claude's Uncle, but in the end, the paralogue also kind of absolved Count Gloucester. Curious. The story made a point to suspect the messenger from Count Gloucester, who sent the orders to the mercenaries, to attack all merchants who approached Riegan territory. The story made a point to make it seem that Count Gloucester didn't know anything about that messenger. Makes it sound like Count Gloucester is innocent, and maybe that messenger was actually an Agarthan spy or something. But Count Gloucester could have easily been lying about not knowing about the messenger and those "fake orders". Count Gloucester is already so secretive with even his son and has demonstrably shown to be an expert at speaking roundabout vs cooperating with Claude. Count Gloucester's house was considered a candidate to take position as the house to lead the Alliance, after Riegan, according to Lorenz's/Claude's Support in FE3H, I believe. Count Gloucester has been after leadership of the Alliance so much, that he raised Lorenz to consider himself next in line as the Alliance leader and to constantly undermine Claude in FE3H. With Claude's uncle Godfrey Riegan dead, Count Gloucester could have very well taken control of the Alliance, despite Holst's popularity for leadership position, since Host has been stuck protecting Fodlan's Locket. The one to benefit most from Godfrey's death would have been Count Gloucester...up until Claude suddenly showed up. I still suspect him. I'm not ready to just blame it all on some Agarthan spy who escaped the Empire.
But it was nice to learn that Godfrey died trying to defend Raphael's parents. At least he seemed like a good guy.
Also watched that meeting between Edelgard and Claude where they formally made an alliance. She spoke with this condescending tone the entire time that just made her super suspicious. And indeed, Claude did say he expected the Empire to be using them, but at least he would be using them in return.
I just hope part 2 follows through on that clip from the trailers, where Claude shot an arrow between Edelgard and Dimitri fighting. I hope part 2 has Claude trying to get all the countries in Fodlan to work together and resolve their differences without violence. ...Maybe Claude will fail at that by the end of 3 Hopes. But I have been suspecting 3 Hopes to have bad endings in all its routes, to motivate Shez to allow Byleth to usurp their place.
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Albus Dumbledore and the Destruction of the Parent
Part 1 : Laying the groundwork
In one of the final chapters of the Harry Potter series, when Harry finally gets to meet Dumbledore again after his sacrifice, the extent to which the past haunts our favourite headmaster is finally revealed to our hero. Indeed: not only does Dumbledore fully confirm to the boy that he was a neglectful parent (when he was put in charge of his extremely sensitive little sister after both of their parents had left the house), but he also even suggests/insinuates that he may very well have been the one out of Grindelwald and Aberworth to have accidently struck her with his hand and caused her tragic death during their duel.
One question that readers may immediately ask themselves is why the old wizard is telling any of this to Harry? Indeed: by this point in the story it has almost been a year since the headmaster has been killed at the hands of Severus Snape, and Dumbledore cannot possibly still hold on to the notion or hope that he will be able to influence Harry. His complete acceptance of this fact can be shown straight after this confession when he states wholeheartedly that Harry’s choice of staying here or of returning to the Living World and trying to defeat Voldemort is completely “up to him” (590). It is almost as if a responsibility or pressure has now been lifted from our mentor’s shoulders.
In an interview with the writer of the fifth Harry Potter movie, Michael Goldenberg states how one of the major themes that he noticed within the novels and which he then wanted to transfer into his own script was the increasing “need” for Dumbledore “to come down from his pedestal” so that Harry may be “disillusioned” and “grow up and take on the responsibilities that he needs to take on” (CMU). This particular moment in one’s life is described elsewhere as “when [one] see[s] the authority figure [that they’ve] either idealized or demonized revealed as more complicated” and/or “[realize] that [their] parents are normal, flawed human beings” (Salon). But the question of how it could be important for Harry’s maturation is never addressed.
In order to answer this question, one must properly define what Harry is facing within the story. Indeed: after but a cursory glance at the scholarship surrounding the series, it is clear that “[our main protagonist’s] battle with Voldemort may be seen as an internal conflict between aspects of his own psyche, culminating in Voldemort’s defeat and the repudiation of those aspects he represents” (Rosegrant, 11). Moreover, the fact that JK Rowling has chosen teenagehood as the setting/backdrop for this conflict equally should not be seen or interpreted as a coincidence. As Call and McAlpine go on to state: “Much of Harry’s journey through adolescence is a struggle to reject the part of himself that links him to Lord Voldemort” (Call/McAlpine, 76). This link is finally broken however when Voldemort inadvertently curses himself after Harry does a rebound spell.
What is especially significant is that not once in the story does Harry play into his enemy’s game (even when he is tempted). In the end, it is this very difference between the two characters – how one will never submit to the lowest depths of trying to kill the other – which ultimately decides/dictates the winner. You may naturally wonder, then, where does Dumbledore fit in all of this? Indeed: if the main battle of the story can only be fought inside/within Harry’s own psyche, then what even is Dumbledore’s role/function/purpose towards our main character? And, what’s more, how does this go beyond the fact that he will almost always just be accepted as an “influential parental figure” (Reynolds, 272)? In other words: how does Dumbledore’s ‘status’ as a parent have any sort of connection with Voldemort himself (- the very thing that Harry must defeat)?
This question becomes even more important when one observes the specific studies that have already been made on the character. Indeed: it is almost unanimously agreed amongst scholars that the fact that Dumbledore chooses to withhold information from Harry concerning Voldemort and the Prophecy that “either must die at the hand of the other for neither can live while the other survives” must mean that the need to defeat Voldemort belongs to Dumbledore and not Harry. In her paper titled ‘Doubting Dumbledore’, Jenny McDougal describes the old wizard’s manipulation and deceit towards Harry as proof of a “larger endgame” at work (McDougal, 162). Alicia Wilson-Metzger goes on to state that Dumbledore wants to “[shape Harry] into [his] ultimate weapon in the war against Lord Voldemort” (WM, 15). Here, Voldemort is clearly separated from Harry’s psyche and stands out as a character of his own.
However is this the only possible interpretation? Indeed: if we are truly to see Voldemort as just another part of Harry’s psyche – as I hope to have already demonstrated to you within this essay – then it is only natural that the Prophecy’s true intended message should change as well. Now, instead of talking about actual death, what the Prophecy could actually be saying is that in order for Harry’s “soul” to remain “whole and untarnished” he must kill or destroy that Dark part within himself (Los, 33). With this new perspective, it might then equally be possible for us to consider Dumbledore’s secrecy towards Harry in a new light and even start to be able to justify it. Now, instead of “offering [up]” Harry “as a sacrificial lamb to Voldemort” by withholding information from him until the very last moment, what Dumbledore could in actual fact be doing is protecting the boy from knowledge that might otherwise have a negative impact on his growing-up process (WM, 294). In other words: Dumbledore might actually be carrying out his parenting duties.
This may help to explain why it is so important for Dumbledore to come down from his pedestal in order for Harry to mature properly. Indeed: in progressively removing/detaching himself from our main hero, Dumbledore is essentially trying to break away at the “great” and “infallible” image that Harry has created for himself of this old man, all the while being fully aware that it might cost him the affection of someone that he holds very dear (Woodford, 71). By the end of the story, when Dumbledore finally confesses to the boy wizard about his troubled past, one ultimately gets a sense that the headmaster’s job as a parent is finally complete. Now, the old man has completely unveiled himself before Harry, and the latter’s romanticized image is broken.
Part 2 : Raising the question
Now that we have established how Dumbledore carries out his parental role towards our favourite student, the question will naturally become why the old man even chooses to go through with this process at all / in the very first place (since as I have already previously stated one of its innate/ultimate requirements/characteristics will invariably be that Dumbledore shall be obliged to gradually separate himself from someone that he self-admittedly “[loves]” and “[cares] about” (Book 5, 772)). And so in a way one could say that there is not much the poor, old headmaster could possibly stand to gain from following through with it. This is a particular question that has never been asked before, and which I would specifically like to address within my essay.
In the first book of the series, there is a scene where Harry chooses to sneak off during the middle of the night under his Invisibility Cloak so that he might have a glimpse of his dead parents in the Mirror of Erised (an object which is said to display/show the “deepest, most desperate desire of our hearts” (Book 1, 229)). However, after the little boy is found by Dumbledore, the two characters hold a small conversation on the dangers of wanting too much out of life and by the end of it the former is asked by the latter “not to go looking for [the object] again” (230). But as Harry is just about to exit the room however, a curiosity seems to wake up inside him and he dares to ask his headmaster what the Mirror would display if he himself were ever to look into it. As readers we may see this as our first good opportunity to learn about Dumbledore, a character which to that point we have not been given much information about.
Much to our surprise and dismay however, it immediately becomes evident to us that the old wizard is already well-educated on matters of self-protection from potentially revealing sources or leaks of information to others. Dumbledore manages to use his wit and cleverness in order to successfully avoid having to properly answer Harry’s question: “I see myself holding a pair of thick, woolen socks” (Ibis). His insincerity with this quippy remark is even spelt out to us later on by the author herself when she makes sure to include: “It was only when he was back in bed that it struck Harry that Dumbledore might not have been quite truthful” (Ibis). However since by this point the headmaster still represents the little boy’s hero, this action is equally justified by our narrator within the very same sentence on the terms that it had been “quite a personal question” (Ibis).
Harry and the readers unfortunately have to wait until the end of the series – during that famous confession scene when Dumbledore wishes he could go back in time after having “[neglected] the only two members of [his] family left” – in order to finally get an honest answer (Book 7, 586). In the end, it is the very idea that our headmaster wants exactly the same thing as Harry – i.e. the notion of having a full family – which begins the process of humanifying him in our minds. For the first time in the whole story, Dumbledore releases himself from this parental role/position of superiority that he has always and dutifully exercised over Harry. Now, he is not the one to give advice or of focusing on the other’s weaknesses anymore. Both characters are to be seen on the same terms and/or equal grounds from this moment on.
What can these passages both at the beginning and at the end of the story reveal to the readers? Namely the extent to which a feeling of parental responsibility towards Harry can govern/control Dumbledore’s own words and actions. It will be so strong in fact that Dumbledore will not even be able open up about himself to his favourite student until he absolutely knows for sure that the boy will be mature enough to take/hear it (so as to not hinder his development process). This is why Dumbledore’s process of stepping down from his pedestal within the eyes of Harry Potter cannot be done too early but must be done gradually. Harry himself only understands the need for such a process until the very end of the story, which explains why as the books go by the reader will often find him to be getting more and more angry and disillusioned with the headmaster.
And so now I have arrived to the main challenge of my thesis/essay. If I want to answer the question of why the character of Dumbledore feels such a need to serve or act as Harry’s parent within the novels, then I will invariably have to try and separate or detach him from that very association in the first place (in order to have a chance of unearthing the ‘human’ underneath). This means that any decision or utterance that our favourite headmaster has made which could possibly be connected or tied to his role/function as a parent will eventually have to be discarded from my analysis. Hence why I have chosen ‘Albus Dumbledore and the Destruction of the Parent’ as the title.
#harry potter#dumbledore#parenting#voldemort#adolescence#bildungsroman#coming of age#growing up#jk rowling#essay#literary criticism
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you…
i’m a complex human being
contradictory is my seed
i thought there couldn’t be
a bigger confusion in its existency.
but then of course, our lives intervened.
you came as no surprise,
nothing of a facade i hadn’t seen
yet slowly you unveiled most parts of me,
i always kept concealed beneath .
repudiating were my words
tricky to read was my expression
to vigorously test your mind,
but captivating were your eyes
with each response you would voice
as you left my essence
shockingly, in complete rejoice.
deliberately went our journey
prudently caressing our profound souls.
until the pace became unbearable
as we ached wanting more.
the need was unrecognizable
strange even in its own kind,
therefore the pain infuriated
attacking the poor, “dim light”.
needles pecked my wary heart
quite again it came as no surprise,
but this time a well enraged from within
and it couldn’t find a way to stop.
my judgment was a haze
i reconcile that to be best,
for your presence was so troubling
but your absence even more of a stress.
hence, i would rather lose my mind
on how tacky your breath sounded
than to never smell again
your odor, strong and enchanted.
the cold eventually swept by
in between blossoming leaves
lingered your voice on how you missed
my acquaintance in the midst .
frankly, it was almost all i needed
to spark the courage and depart
of the grand awaited affirmation:
you were engraved in my heart
on extents no friend should overcome.
resentment abruptly arose
once your hands came too close
people who weren’t deserving
of your brilliant conferring.
although utter disbelief berated me
on why my feelings came in the loose,
your touch grew more than thrilling
and your voice kept me seduced.
my name swirling in your mouth
was a torment to endure
knowing chances of acting upon
were a sheer impossibility.
now that we’re alone
conversing deeper than we ever have,
how can motions of powerful assertion
curve later into seeming refutation?
what ludicrous creatures are we
to interact in parallel means?
how could we have trespassed so far
to yield each others needs?
my internal struggle to confess
your ownership to my many thoughts,
failing on being forthright
they twist in abstracts manners
are paraphrased in even more so.
and quite shamelessly
you reciprocate the confusion
the almost madness.
oh this delirium regarding you!
your bewilderment and mine
are immensely endorsing, consuming.
breathless in anticipation i reside
to have the mystery solved and restored
of what these feelings of yours are,
but most importantly
wether this mere “friendship”
is to ever go up aboard
#poetry #poem #poems #book #books #writing #writer #amateurwriting #him
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By Lucinda Rosenfeld
Not long after I became my professor’s research assistant, I told him that I sometimes threw up what I ate. A junior at Cornell, I had just turned twenty. X, as I’ll call him, had hired me in conjunction with the “work-study” program, which was available to students who received financial aid. He was almost a decade and a half my senior. He was also married, but his wife was teaching and living elsewhere. X himself was on leave from another élite university. It was 1990. George H. W. Bush was in the White House. And you could still smoke cigarettes anywhere you wanted to.
Sometimes, when I visited X in his office on the top floor of a Victorian building near the Arts Quad, as I began to do after class, he’d ask if he could have one of my Marlboro Lights. I had started smoking a year before as a way of dealing with the nagging questions of what to do with my hands, how to suppress my appetite, and, above all, how to give myself the appearance of someone who stood aloof from the petty squabbles of everyday life—though nothing could have been further from the truth.
I remember following up my confession with a question: “Do you think I’m pathetic?”
“Do you want me to think you’re pathetic?” In the manner of a therapist (or Socrates), X often replied to my questions with other questions.
“No.” I recall laughing to break the suddenly sombre mood—also with relief that he didn’t seem to have judged me.
After a smoke-filled pause, he told me that someone he knew was making a film about the topic.
I never found out who the filmmaker was, but the idea that an associate of his regarded the topic as worthy of further inquiry made me feel a little less ashamed.
Why, after lengthy deliberation, I’d decided to disclose such a closely held secret to someone who was neither a trusted friend nor a mental-health professional was a more complicated question. On account of his age and perceived authority, I suppose I saw X as a substitute parental figure, especially since confiding in my own parents had proved to be a fraught activity. I think I had the idea that, if I could get X to worry about me, he’d want to take care of me. Which was the fantasy that underpinned all my other fantasies, even as I lived in fear of appearing needy.
But that was only part of it. X had a slow and measured manner of speaking that put me at ease, along with a calm confidence that I lacked and found magnetic. He was also tall, with tenebrous good looks, and he laughed easily, as if the very business of life were an elaborate joke. Really, I thought I’d never met such a clever and glamorous man and I made no effort to hide the crush I had on him. I attached flirtatious notes to the piles of books he asked me to retrieve for him at the library, and sat down right next to him at the polished-wood table where he conducted his seminar.
I was also angry at my family and the pressure I felt all of them put on me to be “perfect” and impressive—or, at least, I was as angry at my family as I was at myself for not being those things—and therefore all the more drawn to X’s radical politics and irreverent attitude, which seemed to repudiate everything that my high-culture-loving parents had raised me to revere. My father was a cellist, and my mother a writer of art-related books.
Although X taught English, he seemed to dislike literature. He was equally disdainful of classical music and art. (An invitation to attend a concert performed by the university orchestra, in which I played the violin, was declined.) After a childhood of being dragged to classical-music concerts and art museums, I welcomed his perspective. Just as important, he seemed to want to know all about me, peppering me with probing questions and patiently listening to my responses with what seemed like amused attention, which I could only find flattering, even as he revealed little about himself.
If it’s possible to be two things at once, I was both pathologically insecure and intoxicated by the power that my newly discovered desirability to men seemed to have conferred on me. In high school, shy and a “late bloomer,” I’d been mostly invisible to boys. Now, just a couple of years later, I’d noticed with fascination how, when I entered a room, all eyes seemed to turn to me. In public, in one of my provocative outfits, I likely appeared self-assured. In private, I was frequently engaged in a spiral of self-recrimination in which I ate until I was overfull, vomited, then forced myself to go running the next morning to atone for my “crimes” of the previous night. “I’m a cool cat at noon, and a sick, lost soul at midnight,” I wrote in my diary. Occasionally, I’d try to integrate the two sides of myself, as I did that day in X’s office, in an attempt to get closer to others. But, for the most part, I kept them separate. Honesty was too risky a proposition.
Only a couple of months earlier, I’d been in Spain on a semester-abroad program. Still nineteen, I’d been above all keen to prove my self-sufficiency. But things hadn’t worked out the way I’d envisioned them. Not only had I detested my host family in Seville, embittered Francoists who criticized me for using too much of their toilet paper and eating too much of their marmalade; I’d been terribly homesick. I especially missed my best friend at college, J, from whom I’d been inseparable the previous six months.
In the back of my mind, I’d been hoping to have the kind of amorous adventures that I imagined both my close-in-age, older sisters had had on their foreign travels; a year earlier, one had delayed her return from Paris in order to spend more time with her French boyfriend. What’s more, a classmate at Cornell had pointed out that my first name was a near-anagram of Dulcinea, the elusive love object in “Don Quixote,” which we’d read in my Literatura del Siglo de Oro class. It had almost seemed like fate that, once in Spain, I should find my own worshipful knight-errant.
But when the opportunity finally presented itself—at the rastro Charco de la Pava one afternoon, a handsome young artisan in Chinese cloth slippers handed me a piece of paper with his address on it and asked me to come and see him (he had no phone, he said)—I hesitated. After a week spent trying and failing to garner the courage to pay him a visit, I tossed the address in the trash. Instead, I found myself in an unwanted psychodrama involving my roommate, a Mormon girl from Michigan who mistakenly believed I had sexual designs on her.
With even more incentive to stay away from the moldering villa in which we’d been housed, I took to wandering the winding streets of Seville’s Jewish quarter, past trickling fountains and beggars missing teeth or limbs, the 1985 Smiths album “Meat Is Murder” playing on my Sony Walkman—in particular, the rain-enhanced dirge “Well I Wonder,” which I rewound again and again. “I half die / Please, keep me in mind / Please, keep me in mind,” Morrissey sang.
With the widespread use of e-mail and cell phones still a few years off, keeping in touch from overseas was not the easy feat it is today. And I’d grown increasingly convinced that my friends and family back home had all forgotten about me. Seeking comfort, I’d taken to buying bags of “pasas sin pepitas de California”—seedless raisins—at the local market and found that I couldn’t stop eating them. It was in Seville that I developed bulimia.
My hunger for human connection felt equally ungovernable. One afternoon, unable to reach J or to otherwise relieve the all-consuming loneliness that had taken hold of me, I found myself in a phone booth crying so hard that I fell to my knees. A couple of days later, I packed my bags and took a train to Madrid, where I spent a week by myself in a pensión, waiting for my flight back to the U.S.
It was on a visit to the Prado one afternoon that week that I became obsessed with Francisco Goya’s black paintings, my secret new habit having found its monstrous reflection—or so it seemed to me—in his “Saturn Devouring His Son.”
Back in New Jersey, I presented my mother with the gilded hand mirror I’d purchased from my Spanish lover-who-wasn’t. She, in turn, gave me an appointment with a shrink in a neighboring town. But the whole idea of a child of hers requiring psychiatric care seemed to distress her so much that she immediately rewrote the story of my semester abroad. The real reason I had quit the program and come home early, according to her, was that I’d “gotten sick,” just as she herself so often was, with an upset stomach.
I spent most of the next two months lying in and on my trundle bed, across from my tennis trophies and Teddy bears, waiting to return to college and feeling like an unmitigated failure. “Moods sit on me like lead X-ray bibs,” I wrote, my diary having become the one place where I felt free to express my humiliation.
In Ithaca a few weeks later, snow drifts flanking the streets, J and I noticed a photograph of X in a campus newspaper and decided that he was cute. J, in jest, suggested that I do something about it. We giggled at the very idea. Intrigued, I looked up his class in the course catalogue. Although the subject didn’t particularly interest me, I registered for it the next day.
It is odd to think how easily we might never have met the people who leave an indelible mark on us.
One evening, halfway into the semester, X invited me over for a “nightcap” at his rental house, a mile from campus, and then, in the most casual of tones, asked me if I’d like to spend the actual night. My naïveté matched only by my recklessness, I agreed. Given X’s position and résumé, I don’t think it even occurred to me that he might have anything other than my best interests at heart. He’d already mentioned that his marriage was in its death throes. I assumed that he and his wife had some kind of understanding. But, really, what did I know about such things? To the extent that I was apprehensive, it was because I wasn’t sure whether I’d measure up.
But, before long, any concern on my part was lost to the surreal amazement of finding myself in X’s embrace. That someone of what I perceived as his exalted stature wanted me as his lover—and, what’s more, was prepared to risk so much for the pleasure of such—both astonished me and seemed to validate my mother’s insistence on my exceptionality. For the first time ever, I felt on par with my hyper-accomplished sisters, with whom I was always trying and—it seemed to me—failing to keep up. Plus, to have won the affections of someone who had published books and articles, who was invited to give lectures all over the country, and had travelled all over the world (and had a foreign accent, as if to prove the point) made me feel brilliant and worldly by association—all while promising to erase the last traces of my sheltered suburban upbringing. Or maybe the truth was that I was so busy worrying about whether I looked O.K. that I was hardly thinking at all.
All I know for sure is that, afterward, it seemed as if nothing so exciting had ever happened to me. There is a month-long lacuna in my diary that matches up with the first month of my affair. The next entry after that begins, simply, “WOW.”
In the nineteen-seventies, Cornell—along with Yale and Johns Hopkins—became a locus of the literary and philosophical movement, imported from Paris, known as post-structuralism. Positing reality as less a fixed thing than a product of the language that described or “constructed” it—“Il n’y a pas de hors-texte,” Jacques Derrida famously wrote, sometimes translated as “there is nothing outside the text”—the teachings it encompassed were sometimes known simply as “theory.” On my return from Spain, I’d switched majors from Spanish to comparative literature and discovered that I could take various “theory-oriented” classes that would count toward my degree, including some in what was then known as women’s studies.
In one, I was introduced to the work of the feminist deconstructionist Judith Butler. From Butler’s just-published book, “Gender Trouble,” I absorbed the compelling idea that women were always playing a part. Butler wrote—and I dutifully underlined—“As the effects of a subtle and politically enforced performativity, gender is an ‘act,’ as it were, that is open to splittings, self-parody, self-criticism, and those hyperbolic exhibitions of ‘the natural’ that, in their very exaggeration, reveal its fundamentally phantasmatic status.” Butler’s theory of gender confirmed the feeling, long embedded in my psyche, that I had to perform in order for others to like me—and, especially, to perform my femininity.
It was in my women’s-studies classes, too, that I was first exposed to a corresponding movement that came to be known as sex-positive feminism. Mirroring the Reagan era’s “me-first” ethos, it eschewed economic issues and those related to male violence in favor of a politics of personal fulfillment centered on the concept of female pleasure. (In my “French Feminisms” class, the preferred term for such was jouissance.) The rough idea was that women should be celebrated not just as desirable objects but as desiring subjects, and that, in liberating their libido and seizing the terms of their objectification, they might liberate themselves, too. It followed that even entanglements that appeared to present asymmetries of power could be justified on the ground that the participants were acting out a fantasy or engaging in role-play. Conversely, the inherently emotional aspect of sex, along with its ability to make one human feel bound to another, went unmentioned. So did the fact that, in heterosexual relations, biology rendered the female party the more physically vulnerable one.
It was thanks to this line of thinking—a line I later came to regard as casuistry—that I was able both to justify my affair and to identify myself as a feminist while conducting my personal life in a way that might suggest otherwise. That X considered himself a “male feminist” and appeared to harbor few ethical qualms about what we were doing seemed to be further evidence that nothing about our situation could possibly be wrong. And, besides, wasn’t morality “socially constructed,” too?
But, if my involvement with X began as a lark, an act of one-upmanship, even a feminist statement, it soon became something else entirely—at least to me. After a long winter, Ithaca’s gray skies and cold rains finally gave way to scintillating sun, and my own mood followed suit. By the second month, I was in a quasi-fugue state.
At first, my friends reacted to the news more with amusement and curiosity than with censure. Age-gap relationships were common in that era; women of eighteen and older were seen as full-fledged adults, and universities had few prohibitions against student-faculty dating. Though I perceived that X’s being married did raise eyebrows.
The only person I recall expressing any hesitation was P, a kind, hippie-ish friend from my semester-abroad program, in whom I’d confided. “Is this really what you want?” she wrote to me. “Or are you being dragged along by this powerful drowning wave? Your initiative or his? [And] how do you always get into these relationships with such a dominating figure? . . . Remember, you are in total control of yourself!”
But, while I appreciated P’s concern, I had no answer to allay it, if only because being subsumed by a “powerful drowning wave” was, in truth, precisely what I was hoping for. Where once I’d lived in fear of losing control—as a child, I’d been particularly frightened of carnival rides and deep water—now all I secretly wanted was to close my eyes and let someone else take charge. Also, to the extent that X seemed as besotted with me as I was with him—within forty-eight hours, he’d said that he missed me when we were apart—I could believe that the “initiative” belonged to us both. But, really, I wasn’t thinking about such things. I’d never before felt so desired and admired. For the moment, at least, and to my enormous relief, my eating disorder had vanished—and my appetite along with it. I’d regained my confidence, as well. Waking at X’s place, I felt as if, after having spent years at the “kids’ table,” I’d finally been invited to join the adult one, where wine and witty conversation flowed freely.
I soon concluded that I’d fallen in love—but also that we’d fallen in love.
Simultaneously, I rejoiced that X seemed to misread me, if self-servingly, as a happy-go-lucky, young sophisticate. Although I was never wholly comfortable in his presence, I did my best to embody his misreading. “Everyone returns us to a different sense of ourselves, for we become a little of who they think we are,” Alain de Botton writes in “On Love.”
Most of the untruths that passed between X and me were lies of omission. When my inauthenticity seemed at risk of exposure, however, I’d actively fib. I recall him asking me once if I’d ever been in “one of those sororities” and me quickly denying that I would ever have belonged to something so juvenile or politically regressive, when, in fact, I’d lived at my sorority house, albeit unhappily, for part of sophomore year.
But, to the extent that my life had become a Russian nesting doll of secrets and evasions, one encompassing the other, the entire contraption seemed at perpetual risk of coming apart, which only added to my anxiety. X kept me hidden from his friends and colleagues, and he expected me to be quiet about our involvement, too, both to preserve his own privacy and to protect his wife’s feelings. (In response to my urging him to come clean, he would say that she was not the one who had done anything wrong.) Although I’d accepted his refusal to conduct our relationship openly, I defied him by telling every friend I had, as proud of our connection as X was concerned about it becoming public knowledge, even as I feared X would find out and be furious at me.
Outside the classroom, we were two people of disparate ages delighting in each other’s company—laughing, gossiping, and bantering. When not watching trashy TV or “feminist porn,” we’d go on drives up the lake. But the power imbalance between us was never not present. When I least expected it, he’d turn stern and reprimand me—one time, for being insufficiently deferential to the waitress at the diner where we sat eating our breakfast and, by association, to the “working classes.” On occasions such as these, I’d fall silent, rather than defend myself, inclined to believe that he knew better than I did.
There was rarely any intellectual exchange between us, beyond X imparting his dark and paranoid view of the world, and me listening and offering the occasional question or quip. Sometimes, a little voice inside me would ask, Really?, with regard to some tendentious assertion he’d presented as the indubitable truth. But I mostly kept my doubts to myself.
I also remember sitting alongside X in his living room, as he read my classwork. “This was a great paper,” he wrote on the last page, before handing it back to me. “Too short, of course, to fully explore what you mean by the ‘mentality of suburban life.’ ” If I found this setup problematic in any way, I have no memory of it.
Even thornier was how the same dynamic played out in intimate spaces.
As the Soviet Union collapsed at the end of the nineteen-eighties, some left-wing intellectuals began to extoll individual acts of cultural subversion as substitutes for revolution. In my classes at Cornell, the word “subversive” was bandied about so often that I came to think of it as a synonym for “good.” The AIDS crisis and the heartless response to it from the Christian right, then America’s chief proponent of “family values,” further buttressed the belief, seemingly shared by X, that libertinism was not just compatible with feminism but an ideal worth championing. In one of my women’s-studies classes, we were even reading a novel—“Justine”—by the Marquis de Sade.
But if X believed that, in transgressing with his student slash research assistant, he was sticking it to the man, he did so without seeming to realize that he was The Man—or, at least, he was for me. As reluctant to disappoint him as I was determined to prove my mettle, I’d effectively surrendered all agency. I don’t know if I was even able to differentiate between his pleasure and mine, or mine and its opposite; they were all jumbled together in my head. Whatever X wanted, I reflexively wanted, too. At any point, of course, I could have said no. I was not under threat of punishment.
But I never said no. I longed for any and all manifestations of X’s affection. I was also scared of losing him.
More generally, the sexual revolution had made asserting boundaries the business of prudes. Wary of being saddled with such a damning label, young women like me were therefore disinclined to have any boundaries whatsoever.
Which was all to the benefit of those who felt entitled to violate them.
I was scared of losing X, but I could not see that I was already in the process of doing so. One day, as we climbed the shaded banks of one of Ithaca’s scenic falls, he told me that our relationship was “ill-fated.” I looked up the meaning of the word when I got back to my room.
Yet even when I was faced with an official definition—“destined for misfortune; doomed”—I did not absorb its implication for my own life. Instead, I recall noting that one of the synonyms given was “star-crossed,” a word I associated positively with “Romeo and Juliet” and, by extension, great passion.
Or, maybe, there was a part of me that liked the idea of being involved in something impossible and fraught. (At least it wasn’t boring, like New Jersey.) And wasn’t true love almost by definition tragic?
Or am I lying to myself? Like X, maybe I’d organized my personal life, however unconsciously, in such a way as to avoid any chance of actual intimacy. From a certain angle, conducting a “fantasy relationship” was far safer than conducting a real one.
But, of course, it wasn’t safe at all.
At the end of the spring semester, X invited me to spend the weekend at his wife’s house, in the city where she taught, while she was out of town. Once again, it did not occur to me to object. Nor, in my immaturity, could I conceive of X’s wife as another fully sentient human who, in all likelihood, would not want me in her home. My only objection was that I couldn’t afford to go; he sent me a plane ticket. (X told The New Yorker that he remembers several incidents described in this piece differently.)
I no longer recall the interiors of the different houses and apartments where X and I met up that year. What I do remember are the shampoos in the bathrooms: Aussie at his place, some kind of henna rinse at hers. In their perceived exoticness, as much as in their implied intimacy, the sight and smell of one or another plastic bottle would leave me briefly startled by my own misbegotten proximity, if not startled enough to dislodge the delusions that had taken up residence in my head.
Halfway through that summer, which I spent mostly in Ithaca, where our visits continued, I told X, for the first time, that I loved him. I had never said those words to a non-family member before. Having concluded my teens without understanding that desire, especially as it’s experienced by some men, only sometimes overlaps with deeper emotions, I assumed he’d reciprocate.
That he did not actually love me was not an idea I had entertained—until he failed to echo my declaration, claiming that, although he was flattered by my pronouncement, were he to do so, it would imply a commitment that he couldn’t make. Nevertheless, he did not express any misgivings about continuing our affair.
At first, I tried to rationalize X’s response. I appreciated that he’d been honest. It was true that he was in no position to commit to a romantic partner right now. And, in the end, weren’t they just words—which, as I’d learned in my theory classes, had no intrinsic meaning and referred only to other words?
But, over time, X’s withholding of the words I’d wanted to hear began to eat away at me like a parasite, summoning back the feelings of inadequacy and alienation for which our affair, at least initially, had been the ultimate balm. It was no longer enough for me simply to be desired. I wanted to be loved, too—and could come up with no answer as to why I was not by X, except that I wasn’t good enough to be so.
I conjectured that he kept me a secret for similar reasons. “How can I not help but think that I am unacceptable, embarrassing . . . when he won’t tell any of his friends about me—needless to say, his wife” I wrote in my diary. In growing frustration, one day I dashed off a letter to X, calling him a “piece of shit” and telling him that our affair was over. But, soon after, I must have told him that I hadn’t meant what I’d said. The next time I saw him, I recall him telling me that my letter had been “extremely hurtful” to him. Then I felt guilty and embarrassed and found myself apologizing for mistreating him.
It wasn’t just that I had placed X on an impossibly high pedestal in my mind; I’d made his feelings for me the measure of my self-worth. Rather than walking away, therefore, I was inclined to dig in. “I want him to take responsibility for the double life he’s been leading,” I wrote.
Of course, he did no such thing. Nor did I actually insist on it.
At the beginning of the fall semester, I developed a kidney infection, the result of an untreated U.T.I. and, more generally, of my failure to notice or take care of my health. I was in the hospital for six days. My parents drove four hours each way to come and see me, but, to my recollection, stayed only twenty minutes; my mother found hospitals too upsetting.
X, who had by then left Ithaca and reassumed his regular post, didn’t visit at all. But a bouquet soon arrived from him, accompanied by a card that alluded to “our song” and was signed, “Love [X].” I was surprised, touched, and even hopeful. Never mind that “our song,” a cover version of the 1983 R. & B. hit “Just Be Good to Me”—which X had, of course, picked out himself, then recorded for me on a cassette tape—was about a young woman who was so enamored of the man in her life that she didn’t mind sharing him with unnamed others. I remember endlessly rewinding the tape on my mini boombox, parsing the lyrics in search of evidence that, one day, just as the song went, We could be together, be together.
Once recovered, I began spending weekends with X in New York City, where he now lived—always, of course, at his convenience and in accordance with the dictates of his schedule. Even if he wouldn’t publicly acknowledge me or say that he loved me, I still felt special and excited to be in his company. Flea-market shopping in Chelsea with my secret, inappropriate, older “boyfriend,” or sitting across from him in a dimly lit SoHo bistro, or browsing the aisles of the St. Mark’s Bookshop in the East Village—I could almost imagine myself into one of the contemporary novels and short-story collections I read on school breaks, like Tama Janowitz’s “Slaves of New York,” Jay McInerney’s “Bright Lights, Big City,” or Mary Gaitskill’s “Bad Behavior,” at least insofar as those books were about underemployed hipsters in downtown Manhattan, making chic messes out of their dysfunctional lives. To do so made me feel finally grown-up. Yet the feeling was constantly being thwarted by my fear that I couldn’t actually keep up with X—that I hadn’t read the “right” books or heard of the “right” people or had the “right” life experiences. It was another old anxiety, no doubt tracing back to my sisters.
When I think of that year, I see myself frantically lighting one cigarette after another, as if it were possible to disguise my shortcomings behind the smoke they generated. I didn’t understand then that a large part of my appeal for X was that I was beneath him, looking up. Or, rather, gazing worshipfully upward. Why else would a professor even pursue a relationship with an undergraduate? Maybe I wasn’t the only one who was afraid of being truly seen or known.
“Woman [is the] pivot point of consumerism, [both] as ‘consumer’ and ‘consumed,’ ” I wrote on the second page of my notebook for my favorite class, Fetishism 409, a graduate-level seminar I’d lucked into that fall. The class was taught by the feminist film theorist and filmmaker Laura Mulvey, who is famous today for having coined the phrase “the male gaze.” Thanks to Mulvey, I began to challenge the more facile assumptions of sex-positive feminism.
Yet, even as I became expert at seeing how Hollywood objectified and fetishized its female stars, reducing them to nothing but their appearance—and even as I was disgusted that this was the case—I found that I still on some level wanted to be the object of the gaze I was deriding.
A similarly contradictory set of impulses had begun to inform my thinking about my affair. What did I even see in X at this point? I suspect it was less that I saw something than that I’d grown attached and therefore determined to make him care as much as I did, even as my ever-increasing complaints, demands, and dramatic departures failed to elicit in him what I felt would be an appropriately emotional response, further wounding and frustrating me.
“We’re just giving in to our desire,” he replied fatuously when I objected to his latest plan for us to go to his wife’s house.
I had also begun to notice that, even when X was at the center of the drama, he kept himself at a distance. He sometimes referred to our relationship as a “narrative”—as if all the action were happening to a set of fictional characters, as opposed to ones made of flesh and blood. (And as if he weren’t the narrative’s chief protagonist.) And, the more he assumed the role of passive spectator, the more I found myself cast as the desperate pursuer—and the more our affair began to resemble another self-harming addiction in my life that seemed beyond my capabilities to regulate.
When X asked if I wanted any of the old clothes that his wife was getting rid of, was he simply trying to be nice because I was a student with no spending money, or did he relish the deception implicit in the image of me walking around campus dressed like her? As usual, by the time I thought to wonder, it seemed too late to ask.
I was similarly uncertain how to interpret X’s announcement that it would be “erotic” if I met him at a hotel in Massachusetts, one weekend when he was slated to attend an academic conference at Harvard. Should I feel flattered? Degraded? Increasingly, I felt out of my depth, without any clear route back to shore.
In any event, I saw the invitation as an opportunity to finally introduce X to one of my sisters, who was in Cambridge finishing her degree and whom I regarded as similarly glamorous. I suppose I hoped to impress each of them with my connection to the other.
But, over an awkward coffee at a café in Harvard Square, X seemed as uncomfortable as my sister seemed wary. And that night, when he and I met up again after dinner and drove to a Marriott on the outskirts of the city, he was cold and uncommunicative and walked two steps ahead of me on our way into the bar. Maybe he was trying to punish me for conscripting him to play a part he’d never agreed to play. Or maybe it was simply that his infatuation with me had come to an abrupt end; whatever tenderness he’d once harbored for me appeared to have evaporated.
I assume that, during the night that followed, X did not intend to hurt me physically. But nor did he show an iota of concern for my safety and well-being. Yet again, given my passivity and inexperience, and the skewed power dynamic that fed upon them, it did not occur to me that I ought to protest. (I had also drunk enough that the room spun when I closed my eyes.)
But, waking before dawn, I was as frightened as I was bewildered to find my legs trembling and both of my kneecaps grotesquely bloodied by carpet burns. Sitting on the edge of the bathtub, examining my damaged flesh, I wondered how I’d got to this point—and what any of it had to do with liberation (or love). When X woke a few hours later, he asked how “that” had happened, as if he’d had nothing to do with it, then complained that he was running late. Upon our arrival at the conference a short time later—I planned to hitch a ride back to Ithaca with a Cornell graduate student—X pretended not to know me and allowed someone to introduce us when I approached. As if it were all some kind of parlor game.
I remember standing in a crowd of strangers, dressed in my favorite vintage trenchcoat, my wounds hidden beneath my white jeans, feeling as if I were hovering outside myself. If I’d once felt beautiful around X, now I felt erased—unsure if the thing I understood to be my life was even real anymore.
He didn’t phone that night—not to see if I’d made it back to college safely, and not to make sure that I was all right. Nor did he phone the day after that. And, when I finally phoned him to report on and ask tentative questions about my injuries, which had prompted the nurse at the campus health center to express concern, he said that I’d been acting like a “slut.”
I have a dim memory of him laughing afterward. Though it seems just as possible that I made that part up, if only to convince myself that he’d been merely kidding around. In any case, I do recall trying to find the accusation flattering. Reclaiming old slurs had become a popular semantic practice.
But shock, shame, and alarm flickered in the background of my consciousness, like the changing colors of a stoplight caught in the rearview mirror. Was X revealing a latent misogyny that had infected our affair all along?
Or was he right, and was that all I amounted to?
One afternoon, my motives opaque even to myself, I waited for my favorite women’s-studies professor after class and attempted to tell her about my affair. Was I trying to impress her with my “adult credentials” so that she would want to be my friend? Did I hope to get X into trouble? Or was I seeking yet another quasi-parental figure to guide and console me? Maybe it was all three.
But she cut me off mid-sentence, a stricken look on her face, and announced, “Oh, dear, I don’t think you should be telling me this”—before apologetically sending me on my way. Afterward, I was mortified and furious at myself for the misjudgment.
Today, it is easy to imagine the same professor feeling compelled not just to listen but to report what she’d heard to the campus Title IX office, whereupon an investigation might be opened.
A couple of weeks—and another breakup attempt, this one in person—later, I discovered that X was returning to Ithaca, not to see me but to have Thanksgiving dinner with his wife and their friends. That he would soon be close by but with others devastated me. I cried as hard as I had in that phone booth in Seville.
Except this time I couldn’t stop. Still shocked by the disregard for my personal welfare that X had demonstrated during the conference, I had finally begun to understand not only that he would never take care of me but that our affair was, at best, a distant cousin of love.
Yet, without X, I no longer felt I belonged or mattered to the world. “Alone. I am alone,” I wrote in my diary. “I could call some friends maybe. But I am still alone. . . . [X] is not there for me—doesn’t love me. Why would he?”
It’s still unclear to me whether it was the demise of my affair that caused me to temporarily lose my ability to live in my body—or whether that loss was already in the works and X was merely a vehicle to which I’d hitched myself in order to advance the journey.
“Dr. G___ thinks [X] is fucking me up—making me crazy—making me puke. I don’t know anymore,” I’d noted earlier in the fall, referring to the psychiatrist I’d begun to see.
My eating disorder had come blazing back to life. I considered a day when I threw up only once to have been a success. There were fewer and fewer of those days.
If my bulimia had begun in part as a dieting strategy, it had evolved into something that had more to do with compulsion than with vanity. I didn’t fully understand it myself, though I’d located an explanation in one of the “theory” books I was reading—Julia Kristeva’s “Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection.” “I am throwing up as a masochistic ritual designed to reaffirm my being (the interior) (the ‘I’ w/ boundaries) . . . even though I realize my non-space,” I wrote.
Looking back, I suspect the real explanation was that I’d internalized the anger that I didn’t know how to express to X. As I cycled between comfort and horror, shame and relief, I was maybe also trying to regain a sense of control over my life. As if my negative feelings might literally be cast out of my body.
“I throw up to feel blank—to feel dead—[to] fall asleep like a rock, too tired to feel anything, or to worry about the outside world,” I noted.
But, of course, no such thing was actually possible.
The evening I couldn’t stop crying, I had called X to tell him how hurt I felt. He expressed feelings of regret and loss, just as he had done the first time I tried to leave him. But, this time, he seemed largely resigned to it and possibly even relieved.
A few weeks later, during another phone call, he sounded even more indifferent. “Life is about survival,” he intoned.
It did not seem that way to me.
“I want to die sometimes,” I wrote a week before my twenty-first birthday, having returned home early for winter break. “Nothing looms ahead in my future that I can look forward to. I find everything too difficult, too painful; I don’t have the energy for it.”
It occurs to me in retrospect that, having spent the previous year trying to understand the literary concept of deconstruction, I’d begun to mimic a deconstructed text myself. I was reduced to a collection of “empty signifiers,” devoid of an author, and utterly destabilized.
Or maybe I was the deconstructionist, ruminating over X’s words with an eye toward identifying the “différance,” to use one of Derrida’s winking neologisms, between what he’d said and what he’d meant, yet still failing to comprehend why he wasn’t fighting to win me back.
But, while X had stopped calling, he encouraged me to keep calling him—and was still happy to spend the night with me if I showed up at his door. Perhaps that was why I kept revisiting the affair even after I’d officially ended it: somehow, I couldn’t bring myself to accept that, like words, I meant nothing in particular.
By the time I graduated from Cornell, X had separated from his wife. But he’d made it clear that he hadn’t left her for me. In one particularly cruel outburst, as I was making plans to move to New York myself, he’d announced that he would no longer be available to see me unless I promised to be “fun.” (It turned out that X did not want to hear about my problems, after all.)
Unable to entirely sever our connection, even as I found new romantic partners who genuinely cared about me, I’d occasionally reach out to X.
Maybe I was still hoping that he’d come to his senses and realize that he loved me, after all.
Our last phone call took place when I was around twenty-five.
On picking up, he sounded so uninterested in speaking to me that it broke something inside me all over again. For several minutes, I went through the motions of catching up. The strain of doing so was so acute that my teeth began to chatter.
After I hung up, I felt like a paper napkin that had been used, crumpled, and discarded. Now, it seemed, it was my job to decompose and disappear from view. As if in preparation for doing so, I curled up in a ball on the floor.
X didn’t contact me again after that—not to compliment me on something I’d written, not to see how I was. Every few years, however, we’d run into each other at parties or cultural events. X would always smile broadly, kiss me hello on both cheeks, and engage me in a few minutes of lighthearted chitchat. For reasons of pride and self-protection, I’d eagerly participate in these charades, making a great show of my sang-froid.
But, after he disappeared back into the crowd, I always felt disturbed and upset.
In late 2017, X attended a public book talk that I did in connection with my novel “Class.” We’d got back in limited touch when I was in my early forties, after I’d e-mailed him to address a dismissive comment I’d heard he made about me to an acquaintance, and X had written a surprisingly conciliatory response. In an impulsive moment, I’d added his name to my group mailing list. He was wearing a T-shirt that read “Dismantle the Patriarchy.” “[Y]et he hath ever but slenderly known himself,” Regan says of her father in “King Lear.”
But X was respectful, even complimentary, and he lingered after the event. Which I found, at first, gratifying—how many years had I waited to win his approval!—and then painful. By coincidence, or not, the media was awash in tales of male predation. For many women I knew, there was a sense of vindication and of finally being heard. Not for me. I found myself rattled by the new framing that I felt the culture superimposing on my long-ago affair. In some ways, it had been easier to blame myself for having been judged unlovable than to believe that I had been exploited.
In other ways, it had made things more difficult. Although my eating disorder belonged to the distant past—and I’d gone on to find lasting love, marry, and have children—the hurt and the confusion about what had happened to me lingered. Even so, I would sometimes play the story for laughs, brandishing it as evidence of my “wild” college years.
On other occasions, talking about it with friends, I’d become short of breath and find my hands and legs shaking.
Why do some scars fade away while others never fully heal, their sticky matters perpetually leaking out? I suspect that the unhealed wounds are those inflicted by events that not only leave our hearts feeling trampled upon but that seem to confirm our worst fears about ourselves.
In fact, it was nearly three decades later, prodded by the #MeToo movement, the eerie spectacle of Trump’s untrammelled narcissism, and the clarifying rage of perimenopause, that I finally saw that Goya’s Saturn had not been me at all. It was X.
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By Lucinda Rosenfeld
Not long after I became my professor’s research assistant, I told him that I sometimes threw up what I ate. A junior at Cornell, I had just turned twenty. X, as I’ll call him, had hired me in conjunction with the “work-study” program, which was available to students who received financial aid. He was almost a decade and a half my senior. He was also married, but his wife was teaching and living elsewhere. X himself was on leave from another élite university. It was 1990. George H. W. Bush was in the White House. And you could still smoke cigarettes anywhere you wanted to.
Sometimes, when I visited X in his office on the top floor of a Victorian building near the Arts Quad, as I began to do after class, he’d ask if he could have one of my Marlboro Lights. I had started smoking a year before as a way of dealing with the nagging questions of what to do with my hands, how to suppress my appetite, and, above all, how to give myself the appearance of someone who stood aloof from the petty squabbles of everyday life—though nothing could have been further from the truth.
I remember following up my confession with a question: “Do you think I’m pathetic?”
“Do you want me to think you’re pathetic?” In the manner of a therapist (or Socrates), X often replied to my questions with other questions.
“No.” I recall laughing to break the suddenly sombre mood—also with relief that he didn’t seem to have judged me.
After a smoke-filled pause, he told me that someone he knew was making a film about the topic.
I never found out who the filmmaker was, but the idea that an associate of his regarded the topic as worthy of further inquiry made me feel a little less ashamed.
Why, after lengthy deliberation, I’d decided to disclose such a closely held secret to someone who was neither a trusted friend nor a mental-health professional was a more complicated question. On account of his age and perceived authority, I suppose I saw X as a substitute parental figure, especially since confiding in my own parents had proved to be a fraught activity. I think I had the idea that, if I could get X to worry about me, he’d want to take care of me. Which was the fantasy that underpinned all my other fantasies, even as I lived in fear of appearing needy.
But that was only part of it. X had a slow and measured manner of speaking that put me at ease, along with a calm confidence that I lacked and found magnetic. He was also tall, with tenebrous good looks, and he laughed easily, as if the very business of life were an elaborate joke. Really, I thought I’d never met such a clever and glamorous man and I made no effort to hide the crush I had on him. I attached flirtatious notes to the piles of books he asked me to retrieve for him at the library, and sat down right next to him at the polished-wood table where he conducted his seminar.
I was also angry at my family and the pressure I felt all of them put on me to be “perfect” and impressive—or, at least, I was as angry at my family as I was at myself for not being those things—and therefore all the more drawn to X’s radical politics and irreverent attitude, which seemed to repudiate everything that my high-culture-loving parents had raised me to revere. My father was a cellist, and my mother a writer of art-related books.
Although X taught English, he seemed to dislike literature. He was equally disdainful of classical music and art. (An invitation to attend a concert performed by the university orchestra, in which I played the violin, was declined.) After a childhood of being dragged to classical-music concerts and art museums, I welcomed his perspective. Just as important, he seemed to want to know all about me, peppering me with probing questions and patiently listening to my responses with what seemed like amused attention, which I could only find flattering, even as he revealed little about himself.
If it’s possible to be two things at once, I was both pathologically insecure and intoxicated by the power that my newly discovered desirability to men seemed to have conferred on me. In high school, shy and a “late bloomer,” I’d been mostly invisible to boys. Now, just a couple of years later, I’d noticed with fascination how, when I entered a room, all eyes seemed to turn to me. In public, in one of my provocative outfits, I likely appeared self-assured. In private, I was frequently engaged in a spiral of self-recrimination in which I ate until I was overfull, vomited, then forced myself to go running the next morning to atone for my “crimes” of the previous night. “I’m a cool cat at noon, and a sick, lost soul at midnight,” I wrote in my diary. Occasionally, I’d try to integrate the two sides of myself, as I did that day in X’s office, in an attempt to get closer to others. But, for the most part, I kept them separate. Honesty was too risky a proposition.
Only a couple of months earlier, I’d been in Spain on a semester-abroad program. Still nineteen, I’d been above all keen to prove my self-sufficiency. But things hadn’t worked out the way I’d envisioned them. Not only had I detested my host family in Seville, embittered Francoists who criticized me for using too much of their toilet paper and eating too much of their marmalade; I’d been terribly homesick. I especially missed my best friend at college, J, from whom I’d been inseparable the previous six months.
In the back of my mind, I’d been hoping to have the kind of amorous adventures that I imagined both my close-in-age, older sisters had had on their foreign travels; a year earlier, one had delayed her return from Paris in order to spend more time with her French boyfriend. What’s more, a classmate at Cornell had pointed out that my first name was a near-anagram of Dulcinea, the elusive love object in “Don Quixote,” which we’d read in my Literatura del Siglo de Oro class. It had almost seemed like fate that, once in Spain, I should find my own worshipful knight-errant.
But when the opportunity finally presented itself—at the rastro Charco de la Pava one afternoon, a handsome young artisan in Chinese cloth slippers handed me a piece of paper with his address on it and asked me to come and see him (he had no phone, he said)—I hesitated. After a week spent trying and failing to garner the courage to pay him a visit, I tossed the address in the trash. Instead, I found myself in an unwanted psychodrama involving my roommate, a Mormon girl from Michigan who mistakenly believed I had sexual designs on her.
With even more incentive to stay away from the moldering villa in which we’d been housed, I took to wandering the winding streets of Seville’s Jewish quarter, past trickling fountains and beggars missing teeth or limbs, the 1985 Smiths album “Meat Is Murder” playing on my Sony Walkman—in particular, the rain-enhanced dirge “Well I Wonder,” which I rewound again and again. “I half die / Please, keep me in mind / Please, keep me in mind,” Morrissey sang.
With the widespread use of e-mail and cell phones still a few years off, keeping in touch from overseas was not the easy feat it is today. And I’d grown increasingly convinced that my friends and family back home had all forgotten about me. Seeking comfort, I’d taken to buying bags of “pasas sin pepitas de California”—seedless raisins—at the local market and found that I couldn’t stop eating them. It was in Seville that I developed bulimia.
My hunger for human connection felt equally ungovernable. One afternoon, unable to reach J or to otherwise relieve the all-consuming loneliness that had taken hold of me, I found myself in a phone booth crying so hard that I fell to my knees. A couple of days later, I packed my bags and took a train to Madrid, where I spent a week by myself in a pensión, waiting for my flight back to the U.S.
It was on a visit to the Prado one afternoon that week that I became obsessed with Francisco Goya’s black paintings, my secret new habit having found its monstrous reflection—or so it seemed to me—in his “Saturn Devouring His Son.”
Back in New Jersey, I presented my mother with the gilded hand mirror I’d purchased from my Spanish lover-who-wasn’t. She, in turn, gave me an appointment with a shrink in a neighboring town. But the whole idea of a child of hers requiring psychiatric care seemed to distress her so much that she immediately rewrote the story of my semester abroad. The real reason I had quit the program and come home early, according to her, was that I’d “gotten sick,” just as she herself so often was, with an upset stomach.
I spent most of the next two months lying in and on my trundle bed, across from my tennis trophies and Teddy bears, waiting to return to college and feeling like an unmitigated failure. “Moods sit on me like lead X-ray bibs,” I wrote, my diary having become the one place where I felt free to express my humiliation.
In Ithaca a few weeks later, snow drifts flanking the streets, J and I noticed a photograph of X in a campus newspaper and decided that he was cute. J, in jest, suggested that I do something about it. We giggled at the very idea. Intrigued, I looked up his class in the course catalogue. Although the subject didn’t particularly interest me, I registered for it the next day.
It is odd to think how easily we might never have met the people who leave an indelible mark on us.
One evening, halfway into the semester, X invited me over for a “nightcap” at his rental house, a mile from campus, and then, in the most casual of tones, asked me if I’d like to spend the actual night. My naïveté matched only by my recklessness, I agreed. Given X’s position and résumé, I don’t think it even occurred to me that he might have anything other than my best interests at heart. He’d already mentioned that his marriage was in its death throes. I assumed that he and his wife had some kind of understanding. But, really, what did I know about such things? To the extent that I was apprehensive, it was because I wasn’t sure whether I’d measure up.
But, before long, any concern on my part was lost to the surreal amazement of finding myself in X’s embrace. That someone of what I perceived as his exalted stature wanted me as his lover—and, what’s more, was prepared to risk so much for the pleasure of such—both astonished me and seemed to validate my mother’s insistence on my exceptionality. For the first time ever, I felt on par with my hyper-accomplished sisters, with whom I was always trying and—it seemed to me—failing to keep up. Plus, to have won the affections of someone who had published books and articles, who was invited to give lectures all over the country, and had travelled all over the world (and had a foreign accent, as if to prove the point) made me feel brilliant and worldly by association—all while promising to erase the last traces of my sheltered suburban upbringing. Or maybe the truth was that I was so busy worrying about whether I looked O.K. that I was hardly thinking at all.
All I know for sure is that, afterward, it seemed as if nothing so exciting had ever happened to me. There is a month-long lacuna in my diary that matches up with the first month of my affair. The next entry after that begins, simply, “WOW.”
In the nineteen-seventies, Cornell—along with Yale and Johns Hopkins—became a locus of the literary and philosophical movement, imported from Paris, known as post-structuralism. Positing reality as less a fixed thing than a product of the language that described or “constructed” it—“Il n’y a pas de hors-texte,” Jacques Derrida famously wrote, sometimes translated as “there is nothing outside the text”—the teachings it encompassed were sometimes known simply as “theory.” On my return from Spain, I’d switched majors from Spanish to comparative literature and discovered that I could take various “theory-oriented” classes that would count toward my degree, including some in what was then known as women’s studies.
In one, I was introduced to the work of the feminist deconstructionist Judith Butler. From Butler’s just-published book, “Gender Trouble,” I absorbed the compelling idea that women were always playing a part. Butler wrote—and I dutifully underlined—“As the effects of a subtle and politically enforced performativity, gender is an ‘act,’ as it were, that is open to splittings, self-parody, self-criticism, and those hyperbolic exhibitions of ‘the natural’ that, in their very exaggeration, reveal its fundamentally phantasmatic status.” Butler’s theory of gender confirmed the feeling, long embedded in my psyche, that I had to perform in order for others to like me—and, especially, to perform my femininity.
It was in my women’s-studies classes, too, that I was first exposed to a corresponding movement that came to be known as sex-positive feminism. Mirroring the Reagan era’s “me-first” ethos, it eschewed economic issues and those related to male violence in favor of a politics of personal fulfillment centered on the concept of female pleasure. (In my “French Feminisms” class, the preferred term for such was jouissance.) The rough idea was that women should be celebrated not just as desirable objects but as desiring subjects, and that, in liberating their libido and seizing the terms of their objectification, they might liberate themselves, too. It followed that even entanglements that appeared to present asymmetries of power could be justified on the ground that the participants were acting out a fantasy or engaging in role-play. Conversely, the inherently emotional aspect of sex, along with its ability to make one human feel bound to another, went unmentioned. So did the fact that, in heterosexual relations, biology rendered the female party the more physically vulnerable one.
It was thanks to this line of thinking—a line I later came to regard as casuistry—that I was able both to justify my affair and to identify myself as a feminist while conducting my personal life in a way that might suggest otherwise. That X considered himself a “male feminist” and appeared to harbor few ethical qualms about what we were doing seemed to be further evidence that nothing about our situation could possibly be wrong. And, besides, wasn’t morality “socially constructed,” too?
But, if my involvement with X began as a lark, an act of one-upmanship, even a feminist statement, it soon became something else entirely—at least to me. After a long winter, Ithaca’s gray skies and cold rains finally gave way to scintillating sun, and my own mood followed suit. By the second month, I was in a quasi-fugue state.
At first, my friends reacted to the news more with amusement and curiosity than with censure. Age-gap relationships were common in that era; women of eighteen and older were seen as full-fledged adults, and universities had few prohibitions against student-faculty dating. Though I perceived that X’s being married did raise eyebrows.
The only person I recall expressing any hesitation was P, a kind, hippie-ish friend from my semester-abroad program, in whom I’d confided. “Is this really what you want?” she wrote to me. “Or are you being dragged along by this powerful drowning wave? Your initiative or his? [And] how do you always get into these relationships with such a dominating figure? . . . Remember, you are in total control of yourself!”
But, while I appreciated P’s concern, I had no answer to allay it, if only because being subsumed by a “powerful drowning wave” was, in truth, precisely what I was hoping for. Where once I’d lived in fear of losing control—as a child, I’d been particularly frightened of carnival rides and deep water—now all I secretly wanted was to close my eyes and let someone else take charge. Also, to the extent that X seemed as besotted with me as I was with him—within forty-eight hours, he’d said that he missed me when we were apart—I could believe that the “initiative” belonged to us both. But, really, I wasn’t thinking about such things. I’d never before felt so desired and admired. For the moment, at least, and to my enormous relief, my eating disorder had vanished—and my appetite along with it. I’d regained my confidence, as well. Waking at X’s place, I felt as if, after having spent years at the “kids’ table,” I’d finally been invited to join the adult one, where wine and witty conversation flowed freely.
I soon concluded that I’d fallen in love—but also that we’d fallen in love.
Simultaneously, I rejoiced that X seemed to misread me, if self-servingly, as a happy-go-lucky, young sophisticate. Although I was never wholly comfortable in his presence, I did my best to embody his misreading. “Everyone returns us to a different sense of ourselves, for we become a little of who they think we are,” Alain de Botton writes in “On Love.”
Most of the untruths that passed between X and me were lies of omission. When my inauthenticity seemed at risk of exposure, however, I’d actively fib. I recall him asking me once if I’d ever been in “one of those sororities” and me quickly denying that I would ever have belonged to something so juvenile or politically regressive, when, in fact, I’d lived at my sorority house, albeit unhappily, for part of sophomore year.
But, to the extent that my life had become a Russian nesting doll of secrets and evasions, one encompassing the other, the entire contraption seemed at perpetual risk of coming apart, which only added to my anxiety. X kept me hidden from his friends and colleagues, and he expected me to be quiet about our involvement, too, both to preserve his own privacy and to protect his wife’s feelings. (In response to my urging him to come clean, he would say that she was not the one who had done anything wrong.) Although I’d accepted his refusal to conduct our relationship openly, I defied him by telling every friend I had, as proud of our connection as X was concerned about it becoming public knowledge, even as I feared X would find out and be furious at me.
Outside the classroom, we were two people of disparate ages delighting in each other’s company—laughing, gossiping, and bantering. When not watching trashy TV or “feminist porn,” we’d go on drives up the lake. But the power imbalance between us was never not present. When I least expected it, he’d turn stern and reprimand me—one time, for being insufficiently deferential to the waitress at the diner where we sat eating our breakfast and, by association, to the “working classes.” On occasions such as these, I’d fall silent, rather than defend myself, inclined to believe that he knew better than I did.
There was rarely any intellectual exchange between us, beyond X imparting his dark and paranoid view of the world, and me listening and offering the occasional question or quip. Sometimes, a little voice inside me would ask, Really?, with regard to some tendentious assertion he’d presented as the indubitable truth. But I mostly kept my doubts to myself.
I also remember sitting alongside X in his living room, as he read my classwork. “This was a great paper,” he wrote on the last page, before handing it back to me. “Too short, of course, to fully explore what you mean by the ‘mentality of suburban life.’ ” If I found this setup problematic in any way, I have no memory of it.
Even thornier was how the same dynamic played out in intimate spaces.
As the Soviet Union collapsed at the end of the nineteen-eighties, some left-wing intellectuals began to extoll individual acts of cultural subversion as substitutes for revolution. In my classes at Cornell, the word “subversive” was bandied about so often that I came to think of it as a synonym for “good.” The AIDS crisis and the heartless response to it from the Christian right, then America’s chief proponent of “family values,” further buttressed the belief, seemingly shared by X, that libertinism was not just compatible with feminism but an ideal worth championing. In one of my women’s-studies classes, we were even reading a novel—“Justine”—by the Marquis de Sade.
But if X believed that, in transgressing with his student slash research assistant, he was sticking it to the man, he did so without seeming to realize that he was The Man—or, at least, he was for me. As reluctant to disappoint him as I was determined to prove my mettle, I’d effectively surrendered all agency. I don’t know if I was even able to differentiate between his pleasure and mine, or mine and its opposite; they were all jumbled together in my head. Whatever X wanted, I reflexively wanted, too. At any point, of course, I could have said no. I was not under threat of punishment.
But I never said no. I longed for any and all manifestations of X’s affection. I was also scared of losing him.
More generally, the sexual revolution had made asserting boundaries the business of prudes. Wary of being saddled with such a damning label, young women like me were therefore disinclined to have any boundaries whatsoever.
Which was all to the benefit of those who felt entitled to violate them.
I was scared of losing X, but I could not see that I was already in the process of doing so. One day, as we climbed the shaded banks of one of Ithaca’s scenic falls, he told me that our relationship was “ill-fated.” I looked up the meaning of the word when I got back to my room.
Yet even when I was faced with an official definition—“destined for misfortune; doomed”—I did not absorb its implication for my own life. Instead, I recall noting that one of the synonyms given was “star-crossed,” a word I associated positively with “Romeo and Juliet” and, by extension, great passion.
Or, maybe, there was a part of me that liked the idea of being involved in something impossible and fraught. (At least it wasn’t boring, like New Jersey.) And wasn’t true love almost by definition tragic?
Or am I lying to myself? Like X, maybe I’d organized my personal life, however unconsciously, in such a way as to avoid any chance of actual intimacy. From a certain angle, conducting a “fantasy relationship” was far safer than conducting a real one.
But, of course, it wasn’t safe at all.
At the end of the spring semester, X invited me to spend the weekend at his wife’s house, in the city where she taught, while she was out of town. Once again, it did not occur to me to object. Nor, in my immaturity, could I conceive of X’s wife as another fully sentient human who, in all likelihood, would not want me in her home. My only objection was that I couldn’t afford to go; he sent me a plane ticket. (X told The New Yorker that he remembers several incidents described in this piece differently.)
I no longer recall the interiors of the different houses and apartments where X and I met up that year. What I do remember are the shampoos in the bathrooms: Aussie at his place, some kind of henna rinse at hers. In their perceived exoticness, as much as in their implied intimacy, the sight and smell of one or another plastic bottle would leave me briefly startled by my own misbegotten proximity, if not startled enough to dislodge the delusions that had taken up residence in my head.
Halfway through that summer, which I spent mostly in Ithaca, where our visits continued, I told X, for the first time, that I loved him. I had never said those words to a non-family member before. Having concluded my teens without understanding that desire, especially as it’s experienced by some men, only sometimes overlaps with deeper emotions, I assumed he’d reciprocate.
That he did not actually love me was not an idea I had entertained—until he failed to echo my declaration, claiming that, although he was flattered by my pronouncement, were he to do so, it would imply a commitment that he couldn’t make. Nevertheless, he did not express any misgivings about continuing our affair.
At first, I tried to rationalize X’s response. I appreciated that he’d been honest. It was true that he was in no position to commit to a romantic partner right now. And, in the end, weren’t they just words—which, as I’d learned in my theory classes, had no intrinsic meaning and referred only to other words?
But, over time, X’s withholding of the words I’d wanted to hear began to eat away at me like a parasite, summoning back the feelings of inadequacy and alienation for which our affair, at least initially, had been the ultimate balm. It was no longer enough for me simply to be desired. I wanted to be loved, too—and could come up with no answer as to why I was not by X, except that I wasn’t good enough to be so.
I conjectured that he kept me a secret for similar reasons. “How can I not help but think that I am unacceptable, embarrassing . . . when he won’t tell any of his friends about me—needless to say, his wife” I wrote in my diary. In growing frustration, one day I dashed off a letter to X, calling him a “piece of shit” and telling him that our affair was over. But, soon after, I must have told him that I hadn’t meant what I’d said. The next time I saw him, I recall him telling me that my letter had been “extremely hurtful” to him. Then I felt guilty and embarrassed and found myself apologizing for mistreating him.
It wasn’t just that I had placed X on an impossibly high pedestal in my mind; I’d made his feelings for me the measure of my self-worth. Rather than walking away, therefore, I was inclined to dig in. “I want him to take responsibility for the double life he’s been leading,” I wrote.
Of course, he did no such thing. Nor did I actually insist on it.
At the beginning of the fall semester, I developed a kidney infection, the result of an untreated U.T.I. and, more generally, of my failure to notice or take care of my health. I was in the hospital for six days. My parents drove four hours each way to come and see me, but, to my recollection, stayed only twenty minutes; my mother found hospitals too upsetting.
X, who had by then left Ithaca and reassumed his regular post, didn’t visit at all. But a bouquet soon arrived from him, accompanied by a card that alluded to “our song” and was signed, “Love [X].” I was surprised, touched, and even hopeful. Never mind that “our song,” a cover version of the 1983 R. & B. hit “Just Be Good to Me”—which X had, of course, picked out himself, then recorded for me on a cassette tape—was about a young woman who was so enamored of the man in her life that she didn’t mind sharing him with unnamed others. I remember endlessly rewinding the tape on my mini boombox, parsing the lyrics in search of evidence that, one day, just as the song went, We could be together, be together.
Once recovered, I began spending weekends with X in New York City, where he now lived—always, of course, at his convenience and in accordance with the dictates of his schedule. Even if he wouldn’t publicly acknowledge me or say that he loved me, I still felt special and excited to be in his company. Flea-market shopping in Chelsea with my secret, inappropriate, older “boyfriend,” or sitting across from him in a dimly lit SoHo bistro, or browsing the aisles of the St. Mark’s Bookshop in the East Village—I could almost imagine myself into one of the contemporary novels and short-story collections I read on school breaks, like Tama Janowitz’s “Slaves of New York,” Jay McInerney’s “Bright Lights, Big City,” or Mary Gaitskill’s “Bad Behavior,” at least insofar as those books were about underemployed hipsters in downtown Manhattan, making chic messes out of their dysfunctional lives. To do so made me feel finally grown-up. Yet the feeling was constantly being thwarted by my fear that I couldn’t actually keep up with X—that I hadn’t read the “right” books or heard of the “right” people or had the “right” life experiences. It was another old anxiety, no doubt tracing back to my sisters.
When I think of that year, I see myself frantically lighting one cigarette after another, as if it were possible to disguise my shortcomings behind the smoke they generated. I didn’t understand then that a large part of my appeal for X was that I was beneath him, looking up. Or, rather, gazing worshipfully upward. Why else would a professor even pursue a relationship with an undergraduate? Maybe I wasn’t the only one who was afraid of being truly seen or known.
“Woman [is the] pivot point of consumerism, [both] as ‘consumer’ and ‘consumed,’ ” I wrote on the second page of my notebook for my favorite class, Fetishism 409, a graduate-level seminar I’d lucked into that fall. The class was taught by the feminist film theorist and filmmaker Laura Mulvey, who is famous today for having coined the phrase “the male gaze.” Thanks to Mulvey, I began to challenge the more facile assumptions of sex-positive feminism.
Yet, even as I became expert at seeing how Hollywood objectified and fetishized its female stars, reducing them to nothing but their appearance—and even as I was disgusted that this was the case—I found that I still on some level wanted to be the object of the gaze I was deriding.
A similarly contradictory set of impulses had begun to inform my thinking about my affair. What did I even see in X at this point? I suspect it was less that I saw something than that I’d grown attached and therefore determined to make him care as much as I did, even as my ever-increasing complaints, demands, and dramatic departures failed to elicit in him what I felt would be an appropriately emotional response, further wounding and frustrating me.
“We’re just giving in to our desire,” he replied fatuously when I objected to his latest plan for us to go to his wife’s house.
I had also begun to notice that, even when X was at the center of the drama, he kept himself at a distance. He sometimes referred to our relationship as a “narrative”—as if all the action were happening to a set of fictional characters, as opposed to ones made of flesh and blood. (And as if he weren’t the narrative’s chief protagonist.) And, the more he assumed the role of passive spectator, the more I found myself cast as the desperate pursuer—and the more our affair began to resemble another self-harming addiction in my life that seemed beyond my capabilities to regulate.
When X asked if I wanted any of the old clothes that his wife was getting rid of, was he simply trying to be nice because I was a student with no spending money, or did he relish the deception implicit in the image of me walking around campus dressed like her? As usual, by the time I thought to wonder, it seemed too late to ask.
I was similarly uncertain how to interpret X’s announcement that it would be “erotic” if I met him at a hotel in Massachusetts, one weekend when he was slated to attend an academic conference at Harvard. Should I feel flattered? Degraded? Increasingly, I felt out of my depth, without any clear route back to shore.
In any event, I saw the invitation as an opportunity to finally introduce X to one of my sisters, who was in Cambridge finishing her degree and whom I regarded as similarly glamorous. I suppose I hoped to impress each of them with my connection to the other.
But, over an awkward coffee at a café in Harvard Square, X seemed as uncomfortable as my sister seemed wary. And that night, when he and I met up again after dinner and drove to a Marriott on the outskirts of the city, he was cold and uncommunicative and walked two steps ahead of me on our way into the bar. Maybe he was trying to punish me for conscripting him to play a part he’d never agreed to play. Or maybe it was simply that his infatuation with me had come to an abrupt end; whatever tenderness he’d once harbored for me appeared to have evaporated.
I assume that, during the night that followed, X did not intend to hurt me physically. But nor did he show an iota of concern for my safety and well-being. Yet again, given my passivity and inexperience, and the skewed power dynamic that fed upon them, it did not occur to me that I ought to protest. (I had also drunk enough that the room spun when I closed my eyes.)
But, waking before dawn, I was as frightened as I was bewildered to find my legs trembling and both of my kneecaps grotesquely bloodied by carpet burns. Sitting on the edge of the bathtub, examining my damaged flesh, I wondered how I’d got to this point—and what any of it had to do with liberation (or love). When X woke a few hours later, he asked how “that” had happened, as if he’d had nothing to do with it, then complained that he was running late. Upon our arrival at the conference a short time later—I planned to hitch a ride back to Ithaca with a Cornell graduate student—X pretended not to know me and allowed someone to introduce us when I approached. As if it were all some kind of parlor game.
I remember standing in a crowd of strangers, dressed in my favorite vintage trenchcoat, my wounds hidden beneath my white jeans, feeling as if I were hovering outside myself. If I’d once felt beautiful around X, now I felt erased—unsure if the thing I understood to be my life was even real anymore.
He didn’t phone that night—not to see if I’d made it back to college safely, and not to make sure that I was all right. Nor did he phone the day after that. And, when I finally phoned him to report on and ask tentative questions about my injuries, which had prompted the nurse at the campus health center to express concern, he said that I’d been acting like a “slut.”
I have a dim memory of him laughing afterward. Though it seems just as possible that I made that part up, if only to convince myself that he’d been merely kidding around. In any case, I do recall trying to find the accusation flattering. Reclaiming old slurs had become a popular semantic practice.
But shock, shame, and alarm flickered in the background of my consciousness, like the changing colors of a stoplight caught in the rearview mirror. Was X revealing a latent misogyny that had infected our affair all along?
Or was he right, and was that all I amounted to?
One afternoon, my motives opaque even to myself, I waited for my favorite women’s-studies professor after class and attempted to tell her about my affair. Was I trying to impress her with my “adult credentials” so that she would want to be my friend? Did I hope to get X into trouble? Or was I seeking yet another quasi-parental figure to guide and console me? Maybe it was all three.
But she cut me off mid-sentence, a stricken look on her face, and announced, “Oh, dear, I don’t think you should be telling me this”—before apologetically sending me on my way. Afterward, I was mortified and furious at myself for the misjudgment.
Today, it is easy to imagine the same professor feeling compelled not just to listen but to report what she’d heard to the campus Title IX office, whereupon an investigation might be opened.
A couple of weeks—and another breakup attempt, this one in person—later, I discovered that X was returning to Ithaca, not to see me but to have Thanksgiving dinner with his wife and their friends. That he would soon be close by but with others devastated me. I cried as hard as I had in that phone booth in Seville.
Except this time I couldn’t stop. Still shocked by the disregard for my personal welfare that X had demonstrated during the conference, I had finally begun to understand not only that he would never take care of me but that our affair was, at best, a distant cousin of love.
Yet, without X, I no longer felt I belonged or mattered to the world. “Alone. I am alone,” I wrote in my diary. “I could call some friends maybe. But I am still alone. . . . [X] is not there for me—doesn’t love me. Why would he?”
It’s still unclear to me whether it was the demise of my affair that caused me to temporarily lose my ability to live in my body—or whether that loss was already in the works and X was merely a vehicle to which I’d hitched myself in order to advance the journey.
“Dr. G___ thinks [X] is fucking me up—making me crazy—making me puke. I don’t know anymore,” I’d noted earlier in the fall, referring to the psychiatrist I’d begun to see.
My eating disorder had come blazing back to life. I considered a day when I threw up only once to have been a success. There were fewer and fewer of those days.
If my bulimia had begun in part as a dieting strategy, it had evolved into something that had more to do with compulsion than with vanity. I didn’t fully understand it myself, though I’d located an explanation in one of the “theory” books I was reading—Julia Kristeva’s “Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection.” “I am throwing up as a masochistic ritual designed to reaffirm my being (the interior) (the ‘I’ w/ boundaries) . . . even though I realize my non-space,” I wrote.
Looking back, I suspect the real explanation was that I’d internalized the anger that I didn’t know how to express to X. As I cycled between comfort and horror, shame and relief, I was maybe also trying to regain a sense of control over my life. As if my negative feelings might literally be cast out of my body.
“I throw up to feel blank—to feel dead—[to] fall asleep like a rock, too tired to feel anything, or to worry about the outside world,” I noted.
But, of course, no such thing was actually possible.
The evening I couldn’t stop crying, I had called X to tell him how hurt I felt. He expressed feelings of regret and loss, just as he had done the first time I tried to leave him. But, this time, he seemed largely resigned to it and possibly even relieved.
A few weeks later, during another phone call, he sounded even more indifferent. “Life is about survival,” he intoned.
It did not seem that way to me.
“I want to die sometimes,” I wrote a week before my twenty-first birthday, having returned home early for winter break. “Nothing looms ahead in my future that I can look forward to. I find everything too difficult, too painful; I don’t have the energy for it.”
It occurs to me in retrospect that, having spent the previous year trying to understand the literary concept of deconstruction, I’d begun to mimic a deconstructed text myself. I was reduced to a collection of “empty signifiers,” devoid of an author, and utterly destabilized.
Or maybe I was the deconstructionist, ruminating over X’s words with an eye toward identifying the “différance,” to use one of Derrida’s winking neologisms, between what he’d said and what he’d meant, yet still failing to comprehend why he wasn’t fighting to win me back.
But, while X had stopped calling, he encouraged me to keep calling him—and was still happy to spend the night with me if I showed up at his door. Perhaps that was why I kept revisiting the affair even after I’d officially ended it: somehow, I couldn’t bring myself to accept that, like words, I meant nothing in particular.
By the time I graduated from Cornell, X had separated from his wife. But he’d made it clear that he hadn’t left her for me. In one particularly cruel outburst, as I was making plans to move to New York myself, he’d announced that he would no longer be available to see me unless I promised to be “fun.” (It turned out that X did not want to hear about my problems, after all.)
Unable to entirely sever our connection, even as I found new romantic partners who genuinely cared about me, I’d occasionally reach out to X.
Maybe I was still hoping that he’d come to his senses and realize that he loved me, after all.
Our last phone call took place when I was around twenty-five.
On picking up, he sounded so uninterested in speaking to me that it broke something inside me all over again. For several minutes, I went through the motions of catching up. The strain of doing so was so acute that my teeth began to chatter.
After I hung up, I felt like a paper napkin that had been used, crumpled, and discarded. Now, it seemed, it was my job to decompose and disappear from view. As if in preparation for doing so, I curled up in a ball on the floor.
X didn’t contact me again after that—not to compliment me on something I’d written, not to see how I was. Every few years, however, we’d run into each other at parties or cultural events. X would always smile broadly, kiss me hello on both cheeks, and engage me in a few minutes of lighthearted chitchat. For reasons of pride and self-protection, I’d eagerly participate in these charades, making a great show of my sang-froid.
But, after he disappeared back into the crowd, I always felt disturbed and upset.
In late 2017, X attended a public book talk that I did in connection with my novel “Class.” We’d got back in limited touch when I was in my early forties, after I’d e-mailed him to address a dismissive comment I’d heard he made about me to an acquaintance, and X had written a surprisingly conciliatory response. In an impulsive moment, I’d added his name to my group mailing list. He was wearing a T-shirt that read “Dismantle the Patriarchy.” “[Y]et he hath ever but slenderly known himself,” Regan says of her father in “King Lear.”
But X was respectful, even complimentary, and he lingered after the event. Which I found, at first, gratifying—how many years had I waited to win his approval!—and then painful. By coincidence, or not, the media was awash in tales of male predation. For many women I knew, there was a sense of vindication and of finally being heard. Not for me. I found myself rattled by the new framing that I felt the culture superimposing on my long-ago affair. In some ways, it had been easier to blame myself for having been judged unlovable than to believe that I had been exploited.
In other ways, it had made things more difficult. Although my eating disorder belonged to the distant past—and I’d gone on to find lasting love, marry, and have children—the hurt and the confusion about what had happened to me lingered. Even so, I would sometimes play the story for laughs, brandishing it as evidence of my “wild” college years.
On other occasions, talking about it with friends, I’d become short of breath and find my hands and legs shaking.
Why do some scars fade away while others never fully heal, their sticky matters perpetually leaking out? I suspect that the unhealed wounds are those inflicted by events that not only leave our hearts feeling trampled upon but that seem to confirm our worst fears about ourselves.
In fact, it was nearly three decades later, prodded by the #MeToo movement, the eerie spectacle of Trump’s untrammelled narcissism, and the clarifying rage of perimenopause, that I finally saw that Goya’s Saturn had not been me at all. It was X.
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Question
Good morning, Father Angelo, glory be to Jesus Christ.
I would like to ask for clarification about indulgences. According to the Doctrine of the Church, they decrease or cancel the so-called temporal punishment that we must endure in this or the other world because of our sins which were remitted by the Confession. The not so clear point to me is: can "temporal punishment" also mean the penance that the priest gives to the penitent after confession? For instance, because of a sin, after absolution the priest imposes on me a day of fasting as a penance. Can a plenary indulgence gained in accordance with the norms and practice of the Church possibly eliminate the need for that act of penance and, consequently, is the day of fasting any longer necessary? or does the indulgence not eliminate the penances that are "imposed" on us by the priest in confession?
Thanking you in advance for your reply, I cordially greet you.
Answer from the priest
Dearest,
1. The Plenary indulgence does not replace the penance imposed by the confessor.
It does cancel whatever remains even after having completed the penance, but it does not replace it.
The doctrine of indulgences is so summarized in a document of the Magisterium: "However, even after mortal sin has been forgiven and, as a necessary consequence, the eternal punishment it deserves has been remitted, and even if slight or venial sin has been remitted, the forgiven sinner can need further purification, that is, be deserving of temporal punishment to be expiated in this life or in the life to come, namely, in Purgatory. An indulgence, whose purpose is to remit this punishment, is drawn from the Church's wonderful treasury mentioned above. The doctrine of faith regarding indulgences and the praiseworthy practice of gaining them confirm and apply, with special efficacy for attaining holiness, the deeply consoling mysteries of the Mystical Body of Christ and the Communion of Saints" (Enchiridion indulgentiarum quarto editum, 16.7.1999).
2. We must remember that the penance imposed by the priest is an integral part of the sacrament.
Therefore, if it is voluntarily omitted, the sacrament is profaned and thus it remains incomplete.
The voluntary omission of penance is a sin.
Given the penance is generally modest, it is assumed that it is just a venial sin.
The obligation is sub gravi (grave) only if it is a considerable penance which the priest makes clear to be sub gravi.
3. It must also be said that nobody can change on his or her own initiative the penance imposed by the priest during Confession.
It is given to us by virtue of the judicial power of the priest confessor.
Only another priest, and in the act of Confession, can change it.
4. Finally, although the plenary indulgence is a wonderful treasure given by the Church, it is nevertheless not so easy to earn.
It is not enough to simply perform the prescribed deed, but the total repudiation of sin, including venial sin, is also required.
This way only, can plenary indulgence radically renew a person.
Otherwise, those relics of bad inclinations or that "infectious source of sin” (John Paul II, Reconciliatio et paenitentia, 31, III), which require purification after death (Purgatory) and “must always be fought with mortification and penance" in the present life (ib.), would still remain in us.
I will remember you to the Lord and I bless you.
Father Angelo
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You shall not make any graven images
Despair is contrary to God's goodness, to his justice - for the Lord is faithful to his promises - and to his mercy.Ģ092 There are two kinds of presumption. Hope is the confident expectation of divine blessing and the beatific vision of God it is also the fear of offending God's love and of incurring punishment.Ģ091 The first commandment is also concerned with sins against hope, namely, despair and presumption:īy despair, man ceases to hope for his personal salvation from God, for help in attaining it or for the forgiveness of his sins. He must hope that God will give him the capacity to love Him in return and to act in conformity with the commandments of charity. " Heresy is the obstinate post-baptismal denial of some truth which must be believed with divine and catholic faith, or it is likewise an obstinate doubt concerning the same apostasy is the total repudiation of the Christian faith schism is the refusal of submission to the Roman Pontiff or of communion with the members of the Church subject to him." 11Ģ090 When God reveals Himself and calls him, man cannot fully respond to the divine love by his own powers. If deliberately cultivated doubt can lead to spiritual blindness.Ģ089 Incredulity is the neglect of revealed truth or the willful refusal to assent to it. Involuntary doubt refers to hesitation in believing, difficulty in overcoming objections connected with the faith, or also anxiety aroused by its obscurity. Voluntary doubt about the faith disregards or refuses to hold as true what God has revealed and the Church proposes for belief. There are various ways of sinning against faith: 10 Our duty toward God is to believe in him and to bear witness to him.Ģ088 The first commandment requires us to nourish and protect our faith with prudence and vigilance, and to reject everything that is opposed to it. He shows that "ignorance of God" is the principle and explanation of all moral deviations. Paul speaks of the "obedience of faith" 9 as our first obligation. Who could not place all hope in him? Who could not love him when contemplating the treasures of goodness and love he has poured out on us? Hence the formula God employs in the Scripture at the beginning and end of his commandments: 'I am the LORD.'" 8Ģ087 Our moral life has its source in faith in God who reveals his love to us. He is almighty, merciful, and infinitely beneficent. It follows that we must necessarily accept his words and have complete faith in him and acknowledge his authority. When we say 'God' we confess a constant, unchangeable being, always the same, faithful and just, without any evil. 7Ģ086 "The first commandment embraces faith, hope, and charity. He is the same who brought your fathers out of Egypt "by his powerful hand and his outstretched arm." We do not place our hope in some other god, for there is none, but in the same God as you do: the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. We do not think that our God is different from yours. than he who made and ordered the universe. There will never be another God, Trypho, and there has been no other since the world began. Man's vocation is to make God manifest by acting in conformity with his creation "in the image and likeness of God": 6 The revelation of the vocation and truth of man is linked to the revelation of God. You shall not go after other gods." 5 God's first call and just demand is that man accept him and worship him.Ģ085 The one and true God first reveals his glory to Israel. "YOU SHALL WORSHIP THE LORD YOUR GOD AND HIM ONLY SHALL YOU SERVE"Ģ084 God makes himself known by recalling his all-powerful loving, and liberating action in the history of the one he addresses: "I brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage." The first word contains the first commandment of the Law: "You shall fear the LORD your God you shall serve him. . . It is written: "You shall worship the Lord your God and him only shall you serve." 4 You shall not make for yourself a graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth you shall not bow down to them or serve them. I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. "YOU SHALL LOVE THE LORD YOUR GOD WITH ALL YOUR HEART, AND WITH ALL YOUR SOUL, AND WITH ALL YOUR MIND" Catechism of the Catholic Church - PART 3 SECTION 2 CHAPTER 1 ARTICLE 1 CATECHISM OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH
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Cygnus (Oberon) Black III was the youngest of three siblings. He was the quiet one, never interfering in Walburga and Alphard's constant quarreling. Never caring enough to share any possible opinion, and fearful to disobey his parents' commands.
From a very early age, he understood the meaning of his surname, and the importance that it held. Maintaining a high status was a must, and so was preserving the purity of their blood. Not doing so, had proven to be a matter of dishonour in the past, so much so, that not contributing to this purpose would lead to one's repudiation. This would be shamefully represented by the burnt of one's name from the black family tree tapestry, which depicted every member the Most Ancient House of Black had ever had.
It was an hyperfixation of his sister Walburga to stare at said tapestry for hours on end, her attention particularly driven to the burnt names, which she looked at with disgust.
His father's own brother, Marius, had been disowned from the family for being a squib. Pollux didn't like to talk about him, stating he despised him and had done nothing but bring shame to their family. When Alphard asked where Marius had been all these years, Pollux was had his son punished.
The punishments were borne by their mother, a plain woman who lacked every kind of love to be expected from a mother. Irma and Pollux were rather absent during the three siblings's childhood. They had their favourites in Walburga, who they thought to be the perfect embodiment of their beliefs; and in Cygnus, who was young, seldom naive and easily manipulable. Alphard was, since the day he learnt to talk, a cause of distress for the family; a boy with too many questions who failed to adapt to the family's rules, and therefore ended up being the victim of most of the punishments.
When he was nine, Cygnus discovered his older brother looking at a muggle boy across the street. Alphard was eleven at the time, and was a few months away from starting at Hogwarts. When Cygnus asked him what he was doing, his brother claimed they were "grown up things". Cygnus then demanded an explanation, threatening to inform Pollux and Irma, and Alphard gave in and confessed he was a friend.
The boy had moved there when Alphard had been eight, making Cygnus too young to remember such an event. Two years had passed, however, until Alphard found the opportunity to befriend him. He made Cygnus promise he wouldn't tell their parents and when the younger one nodded in agreement, Alphard dismissed him.
Before he could leave the room, however, Alphard called him again and asked, in a hesitant tone: "Do you find him any agreeable?" Cygnus didn't understand the question, nor the nervous hint with which it had been uttered, so he just shrugged and left.
The summer before Cygnus started at Hogwarts, their parents found out about Alphard's muggle friend. There was a big discussion Cygnus was not allowed to be a part of, so he went to his room as he had been told to, not without first hearing Walburga tut "He'll never learn..."
Way past midnight, that same night, he was shaken awake by Alphard. The room was completely dark and Cygnus could only discern half of his brother's face, but the long scar that travelled his face from his forehead to his chin, cutting through his nose, didn't escape his notice.
He looked very serious, and forcefully grabbed Cygnus's arm before whispering "Did you tell them?"
Cygnus shook his head vigorously, before realising his brother probably couldn't see him in the dark. "No" he said.
There was a moment of silence before he could feel his brother nod and the grip around his arm loosened. The next thing he heard were footsteps walking away from him and his door shutting close softly.
His first year at Hogwarts went on without any detail worth delving into. He was sorted into Slytherin, as it had been expected, joining everyone in his family in doing so, which made him feel a new wave of pride he had never felt before. He had no trouble making friends and slowly started talking more and more. Needless to say, his circle of acquaintances was made up of the highest class of students, who came from the most respected families in the wizarding world.
In his second year, he walked into his brother Alphard when he was with another boy. They leapt apart as soon as they sensed his presence and for a reason Cygnus did not understand, the other boy left. Alphard seemed quite annoyed at the interruption, but there was some nervousness in his voice when he asked what had he seen. When Cygnus's reply came: "Nothing." Alphard left as well.
Months later, however, on Christmas Eve, Walburga came to him and asked him if he had ever seen Alphard with a certain boy. As the description matched the one of the boy he had seen Alphard with a few months prior, and he had not been given any kind of threat from his brother that would indicate that interaction should be kept in secret, he nodded and told his sister.
She looked at him gravely and the next thing he knew was that Alphard was, once again, called in front of their parents. This time Cygnus waited on the stairs, looking through the bars towards the small slit of light that came through the half-open door of the drawing room.
He overheard words he didn't understand, that by the tone they were uttered by his parents must have had really nasty meanings. Cygnus didn't think they had ever punished Alphard this long, and by the time he came out of the room, Cygnus saw how he wiped a tear from his cheek. His face was red and rather bloated and when he finally took notice of Cygnus he thought he would yell at him. But Alphard sighed and with a tired voice told him to go to bed.
That night was never talked of, and their lives went on as they always had. But Alphard and Walburga's relationship, that had never been what one could call amiable, seemed to flare up even more.
By his fourth year, Cygnus started finding pleasure in partying. That, he shared with Alphard. His brother had always been fond of high society meetings, and seemed to have found comfort and friendship in the person of Tom Riddle, despite his dubious blood status.
This friendship between the two, however, seemed to come to an end at some point in Cygnus's sixth year. He was the only one of the three still at Hogwarts by then. Walburga was to be married at any time with some pureblood from one of the sacred twenty eight, and Alphard had taken a year off, since there was really no rush for him to find a job, considering their family's fortune.
By the end of the year, however, Cygnus soon found out that Alphard and Tom Riddle were no longer on speaking terms, and his brother had no desire on speaking about him.
Before he began his last year at school they attended their second cousin Lucretia's wedding. At the age of thirty she was marrying Ignatius Prewett, a match that hadn't been particularly liked by her parents, but had been rather urgent, considering how big the difficulty to find a perfectly pure match was becoming. After the wedding Alphard announced he was leaving, heading somewhere in the East of Europe. His motives weren't questioned, and Pollux and Irma both agreed, fully conscious of the school of thought around there.
In the scarce letters Cygnus received from him, his brother mentioned a man a bit older than him who he had met. Cygnus, who was no longer a child, was now fully cognizant of what irked his parents about his brother's male companions, but in a childish way he chose to ignore it.
They wouldn't see Alphard again until Cygnus's own wedding, in 1948. The witch chosen to be his wife was Druella Rosier, a beautiful young woman who sould have been betrothed to his brother, hadn't he been away.
Cygnus couldn't say he loved his wife, not at first, at least. But he fulfilled his duty and never once argued his parents's decision. This marriage, however, irked Walburga to an extent, since she still hadn't gotten married, and was becoming rather desperate.
He had his first child in 1951. He was hoping for a son, that would bear his surname and continue the family's legacy. But instead, he was greeted by a daughter. They called her Bellatrix, following the family's tradition.
Two years later, Druella gave birth to another child. By then, Cygnus had warmed up to his wife, and he had gotten the closer one could get to love without it happening when it came to her. Since the beginning of the pregnancy, they had hoped for a boy, an heir. That's why when their second child turned out to be yet another girl, they were devastated.
When Cygnus went to see his newborn daughter, however, something in him changed. Perhaps it was because he was closer to his wife now, but when he saw the little girl in Druella's arms, he asked to hold her.
It was almost immediate, as he held the little girl in his arms he felt a wave of pride he had not felt before, much to his surprise. He decided then that she'd be called Andromeda, after the galaxy.
The next year, Walburga finally married. The engagement had earned a scoff from Alphard, since her husband to be was non other than their second cousin Orion, the actual heir of the Black family.
Walburga, however, didn't seem concerned at all by this match, seeing it as an opportunity to not only preserve the blood purity of a family, but her own family of all, the one she had been so devoted to since she had any conscience.
In 1955, Cygnus had his third child. Yet another girl. At this point he hadn't even harboured any hope, despite Druella's conviction that this time it'd finally a boy. Due complications during birth, it became impossible for Druella to ever get pregnant again, and so every hope they may have had was swept away. Druella called their third daughter Narcissa, no longer following the family's tradition. It didn't seem necessary, anymore.
They weren't the only ones who were having trouble having a son, since all of Walburga's attempts to get pregnant ended up in abortions. That is until in late 1959, a boy was finally born: Sirius Black, the next heir of the House of Black.
Another son came in 1961, Regulus, assuring that way that the family's name would survive one way or another.
The next years went by faster than one would expect. Cygnus had a favourite in Andromeda, who proved herself to be charming in the most cunning of ways. Druella would always deny having a favourite, but it was obvious to anyone that it was Narcissa who she cared most for. Bellatrix, on the other hand, stayed in no man's land. She reminded Cygnus of his older sister an awful lot, resemblance that only proved itself right when he once found her looking at the tapestry when she was nine.
He watched all of them go to school, one by one. All of them sorted into Slytherin, as it was to be expected. He watched them all become young powerful witches, and he felt a wave of pride that he'd never allow be noticed by anybody.
This feeling didn't last long however. In 1972, the one he had deemed his favourite betrayed them all. Andromeda confessed her love for a muggleborn. Cygnus couldn't believe his daughter, each word she uttered feeling like a stab to his heart; her treason, like a twist of the dagger.
On his deathbed, in 1992, he only remembered that night like a nightmare. That night he had recalled Pollux and Irma's punishments, Andromeda's birth and her daughter in the same place Alphard had been years back.
Walburga burnt her name off the tapestry that same night, and they never saw her again. It was Walburga who burnt her own son off the tapestry as well, after his leaving; and also their brother Alphard after he helped young Sirius.
A lot had happened since Andromeda's leaving. He had seen his older daughter Bellatrix going to Azkaban with her husband, brother in law and another death eater after following the steps of that old friend of his brother's. He had walked Narcissa down the aisle and become the grandfather of a boy, Draco. He had never met his other grandaughter, however. Nymphadora, he believed she was called.
Narcissa was with him as he died. She was the only one who heard his last words, in his weakened state: "Andromeda, Andromeda..."
It was however impossible for her to tell, or for him to know, if they were uttered as a curse or as a last wish to see the daughter he had loved most.
(originally posted on my twitter)
#cygnus black#walburga black#alphard black#pollux black#slytherin#alphard#irma crabbe#sirius black#regulus black#orion black#druella rosier#andromeda tonks#ted tonks#nymphadora tonks#tom riddle#voldemort#draco maldoy#narcissa malfoy#harry potter#hogwarts#headcanon#marius black#house of black#writing#bellatrix lestrange#rodolphus lestrange#rabastan lestrange#barty crouch jr#hp#lucius malfoy
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For Camus, suicide is a “confession” that life is not worth living; it is a choice that implicitly declares that life is “too much.” Suicide offers the most basic “way out” of absurdity: the immediate termination of the self and its place in the universe.
The final conclusion of absurdist reasoning is, in fact, the repudiation of suicide and the acceptance of the desperate encounter between human inquiry and the silence of the universe. Suicide would mean the end of this encounter, and absurdist reasoning considers that it could not consent to this without negating its own premises. According to absurdist reasoning, such a solution would be the equivalent of flight or deliverance. But it is obvious that absurdism hereby admits that human life is the only necessary good since it is precisely life that makes this encounter possible and since, without life, the absurdist wager would have no basis. To say that life is absurd, the conscience must be alive.
(x) guess who's TFP spiraling at 4 in the morning!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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Happy New Year
Series rating: R (AO3: E)
Warnings: polyamory, pegging, threesome, voyeurism, smut
Word count: 5k
Genre: Smut, romance
Female Reader x A.C.E Byeongkwan, Female Reader x A.C.E Sehyoon
beta-ed! Thanks so much to @Alexing1061
Masterlist | Chapter Index
Summary: You admit your crush on Sehyoon and after an apparent rejection, Sehyoon has to make a confession of his own.
If you don’t enjoy reading about relationships that involve more than two people, this story is not for you
Taglist: @Multistan-Net
You entered the restaurant and walked up to the waiter standing by a small, high desk.
“Welcome.”
“Hello, reservation for Kim SuA.”
He checked in his book and gestured for you to follow him. The big room was divided by short, ornamented walls making each table into its own little room, still open but also with some privacy. SuA was sitting at a table next to a big window, and next to her was her husband. SuA fit in perfectly with the restaurant. She was fancy and her pantsuit screamed management soon. Her husband, clearly older than her, wore a shirt and a sweater that made him look even older. A grandpa out with his niece. SuA waved when she saw you.
You took off your coat and sat down opposite them.
“Hey how have you?”
SuA smiled. You were not sure why she asked you here. She liked you or at least she pretended to like you. Sometimes she would come to your office and talk but it was always superficial, small talk. It made you wonder if there was something she wanted from you or use you to get something. If this was the case you had not found out yet.
“I am good. Thanks. How about you?”
“Same old, same old. Much work.”
She waved it off.
“Isn’t your boyfriend coming?”
“He will be here soon.”
A waiter appeared next to you and you ordered something to drink.You felt odd by yourself. Even though you had known her for sometime you were not close with SuA.
Thankfully she was good at talking for everyone else as well. Her husband on the other hand was very quiet. He seemed content just to watch his wife’s monologue.
Sehyoon arrived not much later.
“Hello I’m Kim Sehyoon, nice to meet you.”
He smiled but it was a bit reserved. When you had first met him, he had been much more shy, more like the Sehyoon that was greeting SuA and her husband. Somehow you had grown closer over time. Seeing him this guarded made the progress you had made in your relationship visible. He trusted you enough to show you his cute side, his sexy side but most importantly his vulnerable side. Stress at work had made him gain some weight that he was uncomfortable with and you could not stress enough that he always looked fantastic. Like today. The jeans he wore with the suit jacket and white shirt made the look more casual. His dark hair had gotten longer and he had parted it in the front. Absolutely stunning.
The waiter came and you all ordered food.
The conversation was mainly between you and SuA. She asked about your work and had some in depth questions.
When the food came the talking ceased and the digging in started. It was good although the portions were a bit small even for your taste. As the restaurant was so expansive, you did not want to order more. Maybe you could stop by a convenience store on the way home.
SuA eyed Sehyoon over the edge of her wine glass. He seemed to have noticed too and stared back.
“I was quite surprised when I saw you.”
SuA looked at him then at you. A smile spread on her face. It was unsettling.
“Why were you surprised?”
You did not have a good feeling about this. SuA looked like a hyena who was circling a wounded animal.
“Well I thought he would be the guy from the wedding.”
Sehyoon looked up from his plate and echoed:
“Wedding?”
SuA pulled out her phone and showed a photo. Your face was burning. The photo was of you and Byeongkwan. His arms were tightly wrapped around your waist, yours around his neck, your faces were so close, in kissing distance. It felt way too intimate.
“I mean this guy, who is he?”
What should I say? ‘Oh he is my boyfriend’s partner who I also sleep with’??
Sehni grabbed the phone and inspected the photo. SuA and her husband had expecting expressions on their faces as ithey got ready for a show.
“Are there more photos from the wedding? Can you send me this one?”
Sehyoon looked at SuA with sparkling eyes and she was taken aback.
“S-sure.”
“Awesome thank you.”
He beamed. Sehyoon had asked for photos from the wedding but the married couple had not released them yet. The photo on SuA’s phone had been taken by someone who was not the official photographer. It was not unusual for people to take photos of course but it put you in a difficult position.
“So, who is he?”
SuA‘s husband pressed. He had leaned forward. I don’t know what to say. I can’t tell them. You did not say anything and the silence weighed heavy on you. The mixture of voices from other tables made the lack of words more obvious. You really could not say “he is also my boyfriend”.
“My … friend.”
You felt bad the moment the words had left your mouth. My friend. You had publicly repudiated that Byeongkwan was your boyfriend.
“It was really nice of Byeongkwan to accompany you to the wedding.”
Sehyoon's smile was adorable but his tone clearly signaled that this topic was over. To your surprise the other two did not dare to ask about this again even though they were clearly still curious. The miserable expression on your face must have been enough for them. Sua pretended like nothing had happened but she seemed a bit disappointed. You skipped dessert and paid.
Outside cold wet air hit you in the face. The weather fit your mood perfectly. Miserable.
“Are you okay?”
The cold rain drummed on the umbrella as you and Sehyoon walked to his apartment.
“I don’t know.”
That answer did not satisfy him, you could tell by the way his lips were pressed together.
“I have to talk to Kwanie.”
Byeongkwan sat on the couch when you entered Sehni’s apartment, focused on his phone. You sat down next to him.
“Kwanie.”
He looked up, alarmed by your tone. You had heard it too. You had almost sounded like you were about to cry. If you were honest that was the case. He sat up straight.
“What happened?”
You hugged him and he pulled you onto his lap.
“I’m not sure.”
Sehyoon said behind you.
“I feel terrible. I’m so sorry.”
“Why? What happened?”
“They asked about you and I said nothing.”
His hands ran over your back and your chin rested on his shoulder. It was a terrible thing to deny him in front of others.
“I was afraid of what they would say if I said you were my boyfriend.”
“What?”
He pushed you away so he could look at you.
“Boyfriend? You have never called me that.”
Your face felt like it was on fire.
“I’m sorry I thought you felt that way too..”
You tried to stand up from his lap suddenly uncomfortable with the closeness. The way he said your name made you sit back, all soft, like it was something sweet.
“No, no! That’s not what I meant.”
He cupped your cheek and pressed a kiss full of reassurance on your lips.
“I was just surprised, that’s all.”
“We haven’t really talked about this so don’t feel bad.”
Sehni ran his hand up and down your back.
“I’m happy that you think of me as your boyfriend.”
You buried your face in his neck. He held you tight.
“I got you an early Christmas present.”
You turned around to find Byeongkwan standing in the kitchen with you. This evening you would go out to a fancy restaurant. All three of you. After the debacle with your colleague you needed a good time with your partners.
“A present?”
He handed you the box. It was wrapped in black paper. Hmm what is this? The present was not heavy but also not light. You had not asked for anything nor were you aware that there would be gift giving this year. At your parent’s house this was not a thing any more.
“Open it.”
I have a bad feeling about this.You opened the bow and removed the paper. The box inside immediately told you what was inside in big pink letters.
“Oh.”
It was as if lighting hit you. You felt hot all over. It was from a conversation that you had almost forgotten about.
“I thought you probably didn’t have one.”
It was true. You did indeed not have a strap on. A nervousness rose in your chest but also excitement.
“Thanks.”
He beamed and hugged you. In your ear he whispered:
“We can try it out later.”
You swallowed hard. He let go and took the box to the bedroom. An image came to your mind. Byeongkwan bent over, moaning while the dildo entered him. No,no, don’t think about it now. You fanned your face. This man will be the death of me.
The restaurant that Sehyoon had booked for the three of you was a familiar place. It was the one where he had asked you to be his girlfriend and where you had seen Byeongkwan for the first time. You entered one of the private rooms in the back. The walls were painted in traditional style depicting a peaceful mountain scene.
Last time you only had drinks but the food was delicious.
“This place feels a little bit like the places where the noble men go in period dramas.”
Sehyoon thought about what you had said.
“You mean like a gisaeng house?”
Byeongkwan seemed amused.
“No, I mean… I guess?You know, with the whole private rooms thing.”
Byeongkwan smirked and stood up.
“Sir, Lady, I will quench your thirst for entertainment tonight.”
Sehyoon giggled and you sat down next to him so Byeongkwan had the other side of the table to himself. He put on some music and laid his phone on the low table. In a graceful, fluid motion he raised his arms and like a wave he flowed to the ground. An arm snuck around your waist and you leaned into Sehyoon. He watched his boyfriend, transfixed by the delicate yet powerful movements. You were so captivated by the way Byeongkwan's body moved that you did not notice the waiter until the door was audibley closed shut. You and Sehyoon exchanged looks and laughed.
Byeongkwan was unaffected and continued his performance. With a split he showed off his flexibility and that of his pants. His hands grabbed the hem of his sweater and pulled it over his head.
“Wow, don’t start stripping!”
Your voice was a loud whisper. Your face was burning and prayed that no one would come in now.
“What if the waiter comes back?”
Sehyoon‘s statement was not there to support yours, that much was clear from the smile on his face. Byeongkwan eyed the door. It remained shut. In sync with his body waves he slowly pulled up his shirt as if it was swept up, and revealed a bit of his firm stomach.
“Kwanie!”
You hissed and he let go of the shirt. It slid back down, covering him again and not too soon the door slid open again and the waiter peeked inside. He set the drinks you had ordered on the table and left as fast as possible without running.
Sehyoon and you could not hold your laughter.
“How are you feeling?”
You pulled the zipper of your coat higher and hid inside the collar.
“Can’t wait to get home.”
The food had left you full and the drinks with a light buzz that would have faded by the time you reached Sehyoon‘s apartment.
“Are you tired?”
“Not really.”
“Then why the hurry?”
You looked at Byeongkwan.
“I wanna see the rest of your dance.”
For a moment he stared at you blankly. It was almost like you could see the gears turning in his head.
“OH.”
You giggled. Sehyoon did not say anything and you were not sure he had even heard. He watched the cars passing by as you walked along the street. You had one arm hooked around his arm and one around Byeongkwan‘s. Without actively thinking about it, your steps had synchronized. A smile crept onto your face.
The warm air in the subway made you so sleepy that you took a nap on Sehyoon‘s shoulder. It was just enough rest that by the time you arrived at the apartment you felt awake.
“So, you want to see me dance again, huh?”
You nodded eagerly. One thing you had noticed in the time that you had been involved with your two partners, Byeongkwan loved to feel wanted. The more openly you showed the fact that you found him attractive the better. Sehyoon on the other hand, liked it when you pretend to be unaffected so he could seduce you. This was much harder because he was attractive. Hiding the fact of how much he turned you on in those situations was quite the task.
“How about you put on my gift and Sehni brings a chair to the bedroom.”
Sehyoon looked up from his phone. His mouth opened. When no sound came out he closed it again. Byeongkwan smiled evilly.
Sehyoon set the chair down in the corner of the room. It had been his wish to watch you and Byeongkwan have sex for some time, so now that It was about to happen, a gentle smile had appeared on his face.
You stood in front of the bed and stared at the box. You were not sure what to do with the strap on. Should you take off your clothes first? Leave something on. An arm wrapped around your waist and lips pressed a soft kiss to your neck.
“You okay?”
With Sehyoon holding you like this there was nothing in the world that scared you.
“Should I ... wear this over my clothes?”
“As you like but maybe taking the pants off would be a good idea.”
His hand slid down and opened the button of your jeans. You let him take the pants off. Sehyoon left kisses on your thighs and stomach.
“Should I help you with that?”
Byeongkwan had returned from the bathroom. He had changed clothes. The skin tight pants and loose white shirt were begging to come off.
Byeongkwan helped you put on the harness for the dildo.
Sehyoon sat down on the chair and his lap seemed like a good place to watch the show from. You sat down on his thighs and his arms held you in place securely.
Byeongkwan turned on the music and started to dance. Because there was no possibility of unexpected visitors now, he let all restrained go. There was a fine line between being sexy and being unintentionally funny but Byeongkwan did perfect.
Like a deja vu he made the same moves as at the restaurant earlier. The waves for his body swept the white shirt up and over his head. He threw it to the side. Now his dancing was even more captivating. You could see his firm muscles working under the skin. He gestured for you to stand up. Your mouth felt dry and your underwear did not. You left the comfort of Sehyoon’s lap.
Byeongkwan wrapped his arms around you. Suddenly you were pressed up against his hard body and your faces were close. You kissed him. This whole situation was exciting but also a bit overwhelming. Having both your partners in one room and about to have sex left your head spinning. Kissing Byeongkwan now grounded you again. It was familiar and safe.
“Did you like my dancing so far?”
You did not trust your voice and just nodded.
“Good.”
The kissing gave you time to breath. His dancing had worked you up a bit too much if you were honest. Byeongkwan is too good at this and I am too weak. If you had not been kissing him, you might have laughed at this though.
You ran your hands down his bare back and landed on his ass. So firm and round.
“You think you’re ready for that?”
His breath tickled your neck. The kissing and sucking made it hard for you to formulate a coherent thought.
Sitting on the bed brought Byeongkwan’s hips into focus. You opened the button on his tight pants. They hugged his thighs so nicely that you had to run your hands over them. An urge took over and you wrapped your arms around his hips. Your cheek rested on his stomach. He petted your hair. Despite the wetness between your legs a strange feeling of affection bubbled up. Byeongkwan waited for you.
“Kwanie.”
He ran his hands soothingly over your arms.
You kissed his abs. They were still as perfect as the first time you had seen them. The soft surface and hard underneath was still your favorite combination.
Byeongkwan’s pants and underwear found their way to the ground. He helped you with installing the dildo in the harness. It was an odd sight.
“I think if you come in from behind it’s the easiest.”
“Okay.”
You felt excited. He gave you a condom and sat down on bed. You pulled the latex over the dildo.
“Oh.”
Byeongkwan had shifted into a lying position that showed off his ass. Legs angled so you could see a gem. A plug.
“You like it?”
He smirked. How could someone who was about to get fucked be so smug? You ran your hands over his butt. It was wonderful. The plug had to go first. You grabbed it and pulled on it gingerly.
“You don’t have to be that careful. Pull slowly.”
This time you pulled with a bit more force and the plug actually moved. You pulled it out accompanied by a soft moan from Byeongkwan.
You grabbed the lube and spread some of it on the strap on. Now came the scary but also exciting part.
“Maybe it’s better if I just hold still and you … go at the speed you want?”
Byeongkwan looked over his shoulder and nodded. You aligned the dildo and he pushed against it slowly. The sigh that accompanied the movement was part pleasure, part pain.
“Kwanie, don’t hurt yourself.”
You rested your hand on his ass.
“It’s all good.”
He went as far as possible with the harness and rested his head and chest on the bed. His back was arched and he breathed audibly. You ran your hands over his body in what you hoped was a reassuring manner.
“You're doing so good. You took it all in.”
He moaned.
“Move.”
To emphasize his point he pushed back a little. Tentatively you pulled your hips back. The movement was so foreign and familiar at the same time. It was like a song you had heard often and now you heard it used as a sample in a new song. Byeongkwan had his eyes closed. You watched his face closely. There was nothing you wanted less than hurting him.
You pushed back in. There was noticeable resistance but his face remained relaxed. Encouraged by his content expression you began setting a pace. It was an odd experience to be at the other end of the literal stick. You felt powerful but also wary. Byeongkwan was in a vulnerable position and if you made a mistake he could get hurt.
“Are you okay?”
He had opened his eyes and looked at you over his shoulder.
“Yes…”
“Then can you go faster?”
“I will try.”
You felt clumsy trying to move your hips faster and somewhat regularly. Byeongkwan sighed a moan. The sound made your underwear wet. You closed your eyes and concentrated on the movement of your hips. Your hands held his hips and you drove into him faster.
Behind you the chair creaked. It was the first time since you had started that Sehyoon had made a noise. When you opened your eyes, he was standing next to the bed and Byeongkwan was looking up at him expectantly.
Sehyoon cupped his cheek. Byeongkwan had propped himself up and ran his hand over the very noticeable bulge in Sehyoon’s pants. Byeongkwan pulled down the pants and wrapped his lips around him.
“This is your fantasy now.”
Sehyoon sounded almost accusatory as he grabbed his boyfriend’s hair.
“You should help her a bit more. She will be sore tomorrow.”
That was probably true. Byeongkwan pushed back at you, whimpering around Sehyoon's hard penis. You tried to keep your pace but your muscles were already starting to ache from the unfamiliar movement. Byeongkwan pushed back faster and moaned. The sound went straight between your legs. He shuddered to a halt and let go of Sehyoon. You pulled out and Byeongkwan let himself fall onto the bed. He breathed heavily.
You wanted to be filled so badly now. The moans had you so riled up you did not know what to do with yourself.
“Sehyoon.”
“Don’t worry I will take care of you.”
He pulled his shirt off and pulled his pants down all the way. You did not know how to react to seeing him naked. He looked so good and you were desperate. You fumbled with the strap on but you had no patience left. Sehyoon pushed away your hands and helped you out of the strap on. The rest of your clothes landed on the ground.
He lay on top of you and his kisses drove you mad.
“Take me hard, please.”
Sehyoon just nodded. He slung your legs over his shoulders and entered you. You were so worked up already he entered with ease and you moaned. Finally, your neglected hole was filled. You clenched your inner muscles for even more pleasure. His pace was hard and fast. Exactly as ordered. The harsh contact of your hips that came with each of Sehyoon’s thrusts was perfect. You held your breath as the pleasure built and almost screamed when a wave of bliss rolled over you. After a few more thrusts Sehyoon collapsed on top of you and you kissed his cheek and shoulder.
After a quick shower all three of you fell into bed.
The city was bustling with people wanting to buy a last minute present as you made your way to Sehyoon’s apartment. All of you had taken the day off and you looked forward to spending time with them. Cheesy Christmas movies, take-out food and cuddling on the couch was everything you wanted from this holiday.
Last year you had spent it alone and would have never guessed that this year would be so different.
Sehyoon opened the door and you hugged him. He wore very comfy looking pants and a sweater. You buried your face in the soft fabric and let his warmth envelope you.
“It’s cold.”
Your voice was muffled by his sweater.
“We’ll get you warm.”
Sehyoon rubbed your back and laughed. His smile was the thing that warmed you the most.
“Kwanie is in the kitchen, can you make sure he doesn’t burn it down?”
You nodded and pecked his lips. Unfortunately you felt so good in his arms you did not want to let go and go to the kitchen. He chuckled as you hugged him tighter.
“Soon. You will get to hug me even more.”
“Can’t wait.”
Sehyoon began moving backwards and you followed inevitably. It was silly, the way he moved you in the direction of the kitchen without letting go. You both laughed and giggled as Byeongkwan turned around. He looked at you with an unchanged expression. The containers he had arranged on the counter were filled with food. He set the one he was holding down and came over. He hugged you from the other side and knocked the air out of you in the process.
“Too tight!!”
The embrace loosened but you could hear the pout in Byeongkwan‘s voice when he said:
“It’s so nice, when it’s tight.”
“That’s what she said.”
Sehyoon hollered at your retort and laughed. Byeongkwan let go and you turned around to hug and kiss him. It still felt a bit overwhelming when both, Byeongkwan and Sehyoon, were close to you. Your head was spinning a bit from all the happy juice your brain pumped out.
“Who made all of this?”
You inspected the food containers. Someone had made a lot of different side dishes that looked fantastic. You doubted that they were made by either Sehyoon or Byeongkwan.
“My parents and Sehyoon‘s parents send us food for Christmas.”
That explained a lot. Byeongkwan had said something about visiting his family. His family lived in the city but his parents would visit other family members over the holidays. They could see Byeongkwan whenever.
You changed into comfortable clothes and helped Byeongkwan arrange the side dishes on plates. They filled almost the entire coffee? table when you brought them over. Sehyoon had not bought a third chair yet, so you decided to eat on the couch. It was not the best but it worked. Sitting on the floor actually worked better than sitting on the couch. It felt more like being at a traditional restaurant.
You all sat down around the table but no one started eating.
“Last year I did not think that this year would be so different.”
You looked in the eyes of Sehyoon, then at Byeongkwan. Yes this was different. In one year you had gone from no boyfriend to two boyfriends and it was good.
“Thank you for being in my life.”
You had made it awkward but you grabbed your glass and said: “To us. I love you.”
Sehyoon smiled his shy smile while Byeongkwan beamed at you and raised his glass too.
“To us.”
“Your mom makes good food.”
It was true, the dishes Byeongkwan‘s mother had provided tasted amazing and you ate way too much. Your stomach hurt and if you did not have to move for a few hours, that would be optimal. Sehyoon cleared the table and you heaved yourself into the couch. He did it in his calm, carefree way. There was no hurry in his steps when he brought some plates to the kitchen. Byeongkwan sat down next to you. He rested his head on your lap and you combed his hair with your hand.
“How about we go to sleep?”
Sehyoon looked at the two of you on the brink of a food coma.
“I have to move for that. That a no no.”
You really did not feel like moving. Just staying put seemed like the best option now.
“Let’s watch something and go to bed after.”
Byeongkwan did not want to move either so he simply laid on Sehyoon‘s and your lap. About 20 minutes into the movie your eyelids felt extremely heavy. You could barely keep them open. I will just close them for a second.
A moment later you were gingerly picked up and you woke up from that.
“I wasn’t sleeping.”
Your voice sounded groggy even to your own ears. Sehyoon chuckled.
“You slept for the last 90 minutes, but it’s not good if you stay on the couch all night.”
You nodded and held onto him. He carried you to the bedroom Byeongkwan was lying in bed already, apparently still asleep. You helped Sehyoon to take off some of Byeongkwan‘s clothes. It was fascinating to see that he did not wake from this.
You laid down in the middle. Even though the heat in the middle was too much, you were the one who was least bothered by it. Sehyoon turned off the dim light on the nightstand.
You wrapped your arms around him and kissed his cheek. He turned and hugged you back. In his arms was still one of your favorite places to be. His lips found yours in the dark for a soft kiss.
“Good night.”
Epilogue
“So, what do you think?”
“This was the best one. The right amount of space, bit pricey, but still okay.”
Byeongkwan nodded, agreeing with your assessment.
“I like this one best. Until when do we have time to decide?”
Sehyoon blinked. He had contacted the landlords first so he should know.
“I think they said tomorrow, but if you have already made a decision, maybe it is better to tell them now.”
If they did not get this apartment, there were not that many other options. The ones you had looked at yesterday were either too small or much too expansive. Sehyoon and Byeongkwan both worked so they could afford a bigger apartment, but it had limits. Housing prices had risen dramatically and having two apartments but only using one was just not a good option.
“If we get this apartment, you can come by more often.”
Byeongkwan slung an arm around your shoulders and you reflexively leaned into him. They would indeed live much closer to your place and you had a feeling that he was right. The apartment would be in walking distance. It had a room that Byeongkwan would use as his room but it would have his old sleeping couch. If someone needed to stay there but not be cooked alive between the other two, there would be a good alternative now.
“We could go to work together.”
Sehyoon smiled more to himself and it was the cutest thing. You took his hand. A warm feeling spread in your chest. So the new year would start with moving and being closer to your two boyfriends, both physically and emotionally. You looked forward to all the good times that awaited you in this new part of your life.
It would be a good year.
A/N: This was the last chapter! I hope you liked it! Thanks to everyone who has given feedback on this! I would like to thank Alex again for reading my error riddled drafts and for always being my hype person! Thank you so much ;-;
#ksmutclub#wkcnet#noonasinnetwork#story: fall season#a.c.e smut#a.c.e wow smut#a.c.e x reader#kpop x reader#a.c.e fanfic#A.C.E fics#kpop fanfic#non idol au#queue#kpop smut#star writing#a.c.e Byeongkwan smut
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