#electrical business ideas for electrical engineers

[newbusinessideas]

Top 10 Business Ideas for Electrical Engineers

🔌💼 Dreaming of becoming your own boss in the electrical industry? Here's your blueprint! 🚀 Check out our Top 10 Profitable Electrical Business Ideas for Electrical Engineers and ignite your entrepreneurial journey today! #ElectricalEntrepreneure

The electrical industry is one of the most lucrative sectors globally, driven by the increasing demand for power, automation, and energy-efficient solutions.  At present, there is probably no work that can be done without electric equipment and machines. Yes, from kitchen equipment to television, AC, and fridge, all are electrical things. With the ever-growing demand for electricity and related…

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#business ideas for electrical engineers #electrical business #electrical business ideas #electrical business ideas for electrical engineers #electrical engineers business ideas #electrical products business #electrical shop business #how to start an electrical business #how to start electrical business #small business ideas for electrical engineers #small scale industries #starting electrical business

[fryingpan1234567]

canonically Jason and Tim have motorcycles, right? and B and Duke too but the other two are more well known I think

ANYWAYS what if everyone in the batfam had one tho? because. the potential.

Dick takes his off of roofs sometimes, but it’s built for it. before all his modifications, it was just a blue and black chrome Yamaha sports bike, nothing special. he added a Nightwing sticker on each side, a bunch of weapons (mostly electricity based), grappling hooks, Nightwing things. there’s even a sidecar for Haley.

Babs (before the wheelchair days) had a purple and yellow one that matched her suit perfectly. it sort of meant she couldn’t use it during the day, but occasionally she rode it to work with extensive concealing of the random dangerous gadgets. hers was also a Yamaha (same model ^^)

Jason canonically has a black shapeshifting one like some maccadams shit but it’s fine— it’s loud as shit, so he doesn’t really use it for patrol, but he loves it during the day. because it’s just black, it’s pretty easy to take it out for completely non-suspicious speeding law breaking joyrides. no harm done!

Cass has a jet black Ninja, and her reputation on the streets is about the same as the nightfury’s at the beginning of the first httyd. dark, deadly, and it’s even quiet in Gotham’s busy streets. watch your back for her.

Tim’s got the BATCYCLE it’s CANON. it’s also canon that it’s got a liquid-cooling engine and a Robin-themed paint job, but fuck that, I say it’s dark red and electric and he rides it to work. so sometimes (most of the time) he pulls up with ruffled clothes and helmet hair, which Conner nearly fainted at the first time he saw it, but we don’t talk about that. he doesn’t use it for patrol because Kon said he’d carry him everywhere if Tim gave him rides in exchange. on the bike. he has said on more than one occasion “wear the helmet, ride a biker” and Tim punches him really hard

Steph’s bike is purple, and the wheels do the hover-shift-glowy thing like in Mario Kart (also purple). she’s not scared of you or anyone; she will ride that shit to school and use it on patrol with the hovering and distracting color and everything. fight me.

in canon, Duke’s bike is electric with a bunch of lights and black and yellow and lowkey built like a tank. I kinda like it! I think it’s a fabulous bike for a fabulous man so therefore he gets to keep it I won’t be taking criticism

Damian gets a green and red and black electric Ninja, plus a helmet that he painted with feathers and paw prints n shit. Jon likes the spare, which is just black but has a red mohawk. what more could you want? he could fly everywhere, but he also could just have his badass motorcycle bf drive him everywhere while he wears his dope ass helmet and vibes to whatever 2000s pop shit Damian lets him play. he’s a professional backpack.

did you think I’d stop at the Batkids? sorry imma keep going

I like the idea of Brucie having a black sports bike that’s 90% modifications like in the movie. no one remembers what it was before he took it all apart and added Bat-stuff, but it looks great now! it’s blown up more times than you can count, just because it’s a really good target for rogues.

Kate has one that’s almost exactly the same, except hers is maybe a little closer to what it was originally. she doesn’t quite have all the same stuff Bruce does, but they’re the same vibe!

anyways that’s the vigilante weirdos club, so like it’s expected that they’d all have a dangerous vehicle. slightly less expected— Alfred freaking Pennyworth has a Harley with tall handles and sparkly black paint, but nobody knew that for such a long time because he barely leaves the manor. all the kids lost their minds when they found out. what can I say

anyways some Bat-bike shenanigans that have ensued:

street races between all the Batkids at least once a week, whether that be on patrol or in civvy clothes

Jason obnoxiously revving really loud whenever he sees one of them in the street, on a date, when he’s picking them up from something, just as often as possible. obnoxious revving. old people hate him

cool lesbian aunt Kate picking up kids from school with her badass bike and epic helmet

sometimes Dick will be talking about “his child” or “his baby” and no one’s sure if he’s talking about his dog or his bike

bike-related thirst traps on social media

“race you to the next light”

not a single one of them has left a Gotham speeding law intact even once (not even Alfred, although he won’t admit it)

Wally likes to get Dick to race him on his bike even though he knows he’s going to win

both Jon and Conner have said something along the lines of “I bet I could pick up the bike with you on it” as a show-off attempt, but Damian and Tim love their paint jobs too much to permit them to try

Batfam on bikes❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️

#there’s ships if you squint #lmao #dc #dick grayson #nightwing #barbara gordon #batgirl #jason todd #red hood #cassandra cain #blackbat #tim drake #red robin #stephanie brown #spoiler #duke thomas #signal #damian wayne #robin #bruce wayne #batman #kate kane #batwoman #alfred pennyworth #batkids #if you squint: #birdflash #timkon #okay that one’s pretty obvious #damijon

[strawburry01]

Northern Attitude

Summary: The team goes out to a small Montana town facing a random string of murders pointing to a new cult forming in the woods around town. Only once they get there does Hotch realize he recognizes the assistant chief for the town force- someone from his university days.

Word Count: 3k

No smut just angsty, maybe not entirely canon compliant but nothing crazy.

Authors Note: Let me know if folks want a part 2 (you may get one anyway, but my brain hasn't decided yet), or any one offs from Hotch and the characters time in uni. I have ideas...

It was another cold morning in your room. You refused to go to bed if it wasn’t comfortably cocooned in at least three blankets, but it did mean getting out of bed in the morning was particularly dreadful. You groan as you stretch your back hearing it pop as you twist. Eventually, you push yourself out of your warm pile of blankets and pillows to take a shower to wake up and start the day.

You worked as an assistant chief in your small Montana town. Things were slow for the most part. Nobody beyond the average population, except for the summers when the tourists came in for hiking and camping, but even then, it was never too much. A few rambunctious teens some nights, the occasional robbery of the convenience store downtown, a random carjacking every other month, but this had all come to a screeching halt when a random string of murders popped up over the last few weeks. Unfortunately, based on the scenes and your analysis, it seemed cult related, bringing a lot more attention, specifically from the government, to your once quaint town. 

Shuffling back to your room after your shower you throw on your average attire, black slacks, blue button up, and boots. Being a woman in a small town police force wasn’t easy, but you’d done your time. It only took a few cases before the men started realizing you meant business, and often would run the opposite direction in the office whenever they saw you walking in with a bad mood knowing you would make their life a living hell. Graduating from university with both electrical engineering and criminology made you stand out when you entered the workforce all those years ago, but the quiet side of you still yearned for silence and a work life balance, which is something you did get all the way out here. Well, at least before this all. You’d been working overtime every night into the late hours trying to figure out what you were dealing with. All you had was your bed every couple hours at night before your brain would wake you up again with a flood of new theories and ideas. You’d be happy when this was over, for all the reasons.

You jump into your truck and quickly blow onto your mug of coffee to cool it down as you head out to the latest scene. You swear out loud as you nearly spill it onto your lap as you take a turn too sharp. You crank the volume of your radio up to help wake you up and try to put you in a good mindset. You never tried to come to work in a bad mood, in fact you tried to come in on the cusp of being annoyingly positive and cautiously optimistic. You knew this line of work was easy to get sucked down into and spiral, you’d seen it before, hell you lived it before when you were fresh out of university. It’s what got you out working in a big city, or for a bigger federal office. 

You pull into the parking lot alongside the other police vehicles that had already shown up for the day. This latest murder scene was unfortunately in an empty field behind an abandoned high school. Definitely not creepy at all, you thought to yourself as you got out and eyed the several busted windows on the second floor. You grab your backpack and mug as you make your way to the tent set up with the team’s temporary office with laptops and files from the case.

“Morning boys,” you hum as you step underneath the tent, observing the open screens. You get a few ‘good mornings’ back. Some of the guys had been working since the scene was called in and you could tell. Dammit you should have brought coffee or doughnuts for them.

“Cheers boss”, one of the officers, Carter, sighs to you as he walks into the tent, clinking his coffee with yours. Carter had always been one of your favorites, he was young, wide-eyed, but still meant business. He’d grown up in the area so he knew all the folks like they were family. You let out a small smirk as you sip your coffee, starting to map out the plan for today.

You’d have to scour the entire field. And the entire school. You didn’t want a single potential lead or clue or mistake from them to be lost. The team would hate it but it needed to be done.

“Alright team find a friend and meet back here in ten minutes. You’re going to be split between the school and the field and I need all of it thoroughly searched. Heard?” you said, leaning on the table facing the team you had. They all nodded or chirped back a complaint which you laughed at, “you got ten minutes to warm up”.

You leaned back on the front of your truck as you took out a cigarette and placed it between your lips. Lighting it up you stared out into the field. Dappled with yellows and oranges, you can’t even see the ground through the wheat and piles of ancient dirt. Why here? Any other day this would be beautiful, but knowing a murder happened right here made it such a tragic scene. There’s a crackle of gravel from an incoming car behind you. Probably the chief coming in, albeit uncharacteristically early since he usually stayed in the office until things got really hairy. You sighed as you let a cloud of smoke out of your lips, staring up at the sun. Your phone buzzes against your hip and you lazily slide it out before checking it. 

It’s a text from the chief. “Federal Bureau coming in today. Play nice.”. Your stomach flips. FBI? Well shit. Also how rude of him not to text you any earlier than right now. “Who?”, you texted back. You see the cursed three dots pop up and down a few times before the text actually sends. “BAU”. You nearly drop your cigarette out of your mouth at your jaw dropping. 

As if on some otherworldly cursed cue.

“Y/n?” a terribly familiar voice says from behind you. You take a sharp inhale, before taking out your cigarette and turning your head, trying to look charming as hell.

“Hello dear Aaron,” you say with a smile on your face, seeing the man who’d been stuck in your thoughts since the day he left your side. 

It’s his eyes that never changed. They still scrunch up as he smiles at you.

“I didn’t know this was your town,” he said as he moved beside you. You look up at him, placing your cigarette back between your lips and shrugging with a smirk plastered on the side of your face. You catch his eyes quickly flickering over you, just as you look over him. He used to be skinny, studious, almost a nerd, but the man that stood in front of you now was built, stern, and serious. 

“I got told a few seconds ago that you’d be here at all. Chief keeps me on my toes,” you remarked, internally thinking about how you actually wanted to wring his neck for not telling you sooner. 

When you woke up this morning you did not- in a thousand years-  expect Aaron Hotchner to show up at your work. At your crime scene. It was a tumultuous mix of excitement, nerves, intrigue, and still a bit of anger. You hadn’t seen him in years, let alone reached out. Ever since ending on a sour note you never tried, mostly because you knew he wouldn’t respond- not out of spite but just because he was so busy and focused on work. It was admirable, but also so annoying.

“You smoke now?” he asked, snapping you out of your mental musings. He was eyeing disapprovingly the cigarette still hanging in the corner of your mouth. 

“You wear contacts now?” you retorted, raising an eyebrow. He sharply laughed and looked back to his team as they approached.

“Have for a while” he said, turning back to you.

“Haven’t known for a while” you snipped before throwing your cigarette butt onto the ground and smashing it out with your heel to free yourself to meet his team. “We’ll talk later Aaron” you said with a nod which he nodded back to, ending this conversation, knowing more pressing things existed than-

your-

university-

situationship- 

showing up again in your life. 

Aaron’s team pops up behind him and brings you back to focus. Dammit there was a murder on your watch and you could only think of this fucking man. Grow up, you swore in your head as you forced a customer service smile onto your face. 

“Team this is y/n l/n, a friend from university,” he said as he gestured to you. He couldn’t make eye contact when he called you just a friend. You noticed two of the men on the team elbowed each other, no doubt in shock their boss actually had friends outside of work at some point in his life. 

Aaron introduced you to his team and you tried to run through their names in your head as you shook their hands. You were terrible with names. Agent Reid was the twiggy one who looked perpetually deep in thought, Agent Morgan was the one with the tight black shirt who who had an air of confidence about him, Agent Jareau was the sweet blonde who acted like the unofficial mother of the group, and Rossi who was the tired old dad of the group. I’m sure Aaron loved being bossed around by him, you thought to yourself as you shook his hand. He seemed nice, but Aaron had never been one to not be the one in charge- the little control freak. 

You brought them to your tent to introduce them to your folks, trying to get everyone on the same page with daylight burning. Later than expected due to the guests everyone was ready to actually start looking through the field and school. You felt Aaron’s eyes on you as you told everyone to pair off, but you nabbed Carter before he could object. 

The search of both areas wasn’t as successful as you had hoped. The school had some ominous latin scribbled onto the walls in red, which had been determined to be blood on the scene, although it wasn’t the latest victims. Reid had somehow been able to translate the latin- you could see in an instant why they kept him around.

“So what’s the deal with you and the FBI guy?” Carter asks when you get to the smack dab middle of the field. Your neck hurts from craning over the ground, trying to not let a speck of earth go unseen. 

“What do you mean?” you ask back, not looking up as you continue scanning the ground.

“I’ve never seen you flustered,” he quips as he pauses, “you actually like-I don’t know it was just weird” he said and half heartedly shrugged as he looked back at the group that had begun to reform by the tent. 

“It’s complicated,” you said, knowing that the young adult in him would eat the drama up. Sure enough, he perked up.

“Yeah? What is it? You got an ex?” he said, nudging you.

But that was the problem. He wasn’t an ex. He wasn’t really an anything. He was a friend, sure, but friends also didn’t make out in the corners of parties as much as you two had. And friends didn’t stay up until sunrise testing each other for the upcoming exams every single finals week. And friends didn’t invite each other to spend weekends at their family vacation cabin alone. 

“No, no, no, just-” you tried to explain to no avail, not even knowing how to justify this to yourself, “okay maybe,”. Carter let out a low whistle.

“Hey if my ex showed up to work I’d be flipping the fuck out, you’re handling this really well,” he said, trying to lighten the mood. You chuckle at the kids joke.

“Sometimes it’s just nicer to see a familiar face, you’ll get it when you’re older,” you said, knowing hated when you pulled the you’ll understand when you’re older card. He rolled his eyes and groaned. 

Once the sun started setting you made your way back to the huddle that was forming of everything theorizing and laying out the evidence. Tomorrow would be busy in the office working to get everything categorized and bagged. You leaned up against your truck again, just like you did this morning, and pulled out another cigarette, flicking the lighter onto the end. You waved your team over and told them to head home for the night. You knew a lot of them had families at home, and you tried to be respectful of it all, even if you didn’t have your own. Some of the security officers watching the spot for the night stayed and mingled with the BAU team a ways away from you, and you settled your sights on the pink hue of the clouds as the sun lowered.

A familiar body moved next to you. You didn’t have to turn to know it was Aaron. You blew a cloud of smoke out the other side of your lips and stayed quiet, waiting for him to start. He had his hands jammed in his coat pockets, his shoulder grazing against yours. People used to laugh at the height difference back in university, and it had only gotten worse it seemed, or at least Aaron walked around with much more presence these days. You were leaning up against the front grate of your truck and felt Aaron slowly move his arm behind you, holding onto the grate on the other side of your hip. Feeling his arm behind you felt so familiar. 

“There’s Latin at the other scenes too,” he said, facing straight ahead into the sun.

“Shit,” you said as you slowly nodded, realizing that the scribbles would not just be nothing. There was a moment of silence before he broke it again.

“Do you hate me?” he asked, glancing down for a second, but long enough for you to meet eyes before you looked away.

“You know I could never hate you,” you said begrudgingly, knowing it was the truth. His arm got closer to your back at that and you leaned further onto it, “it’s really annoying honestly” you halfheartedly laughed. You heard him laugh under his breath. You swallowed your pride and leaned in, resting your head on the side of his torso, letting out another cloud to try and soothe your nerves. 

“It’s nice out here,” he said, looking out at the sunset still which had only gotten deeper pink and orange. 

“ ‘S quiet,” you agreed, “I don’t know how you do it in the big leagues,”. 

“You know you could’ve too,” he said, looking down. You stayed staring straight ahead.

“I’m not doing this argument again Aaron,” you said curtly, as you eyed him back. He shrugged and turned away again. 

“You know you could have that’s all,”. 

“You ever think I’m okay with it out here? You ever think I don’t need to kill myself over every case with the fate of the world hanging on it?” you said, raising your voice a little.

“I’m just saying you were one of the best and you could do a lot in the bureau,” he said back, “in the BAU,” he tested. You let out an angry air of smoke from your cigarette.

“Dammit Aaron don’t do this again,” you said, cutting him off before he can say anything else. You throw your cigarette onto the gravel and kick some rocks over the smoldering residue, “I’m happy here, can’t you just be okay with that?”. Aaron watched you and sighed and shifted in his spot, taking the second to move his hand from the car to your waist. 

“I’m sorry Y/N,” he said, and he meant it. You sighed.

“I’m not going to be able to convince you to stay huh?” you asked, trying to joke, but inside you really did mean it earnestly. His thumb rubbed your side. It had been a while since you felt like this.

“I don’t think you’re able to,” he responded, sadness tinging his voice. The two of you stood, leaning into each other watching the sun finally dip behind the hills in the distance.

A few yards away Morgan stood on the phone, peeking around a car before ducking back. Garcia was not going to believe this shit.

#aaron hotchner #aaron hotchner x reader #criminal minds #aaron hotch hotchner #hotch x reader #aaron hotch fanfiction #bau team

[ghouljams]

Hi Ghoul! I love the Professor!Ghost au, and am wondering if the other boys and their darlings also work at the school?

Sure why not. This is Ghost and Love's au tho so idk if I wanna write for other folks. Here's the lineup tho

Price: History(war)

Witch: comparative religion(paganism and mythology)

Gaz: foreign affairs

Birdie: early education

Soap: engineering (electrical and chemical)

Moon: chemistry (organic)

König: ...he's at the ROTC scaring future officers

Liebling: plant science

Keegan: ....I have no idea

Angel: Business of some sort

Hesh: literature

Logan: also no clue, idk why but I wanna say computer science...

#ghoul speaks #professor au

[cellarspider]

12/?? Things come to a head

(Previous) | (Index) | (Next)

⛬

We return to that shambling mass of a film, Prometheus.

Content warnings for body horror, contagion-y stuff, something that loosely be described as medical horror, It’s Been 0 Days Since Our Last Incident, and me, going on a ramble about movie gore to distract myself from The Madness.

There's a lady in this scene who's had a number of speaking lines so far–the maybe-chemist. She has a name, but it doesn’t matter.

But I'm going to call her Doctor Frankenstein.

They have just got the helmet off the head, revealing that it’s truly, unmistakably humanoid. They have noted that there are “new cells” on the head. In the business, we call that “decomposition”, but Doctor Frankenstein is not concerned with this. In fact, she immediately proposes a new plan.

Doctor Frankenstein has had the brilliant idea to plug a big cable into the head like it’s a guitar amp, and zap it with electricity to wake it up.

Yes. This is what the movie goes with.

You know, Alien included a similarly shambolic first examination of an alien subject, but it was performed because said alien was attached to a man’s face, and all they had to try and fix that was the contents of a cargo ship’s medbay, with the only qualified personnel being the corporate android who had been ordered to consider the crew expendable. The crew of the Prometheus has no such excuse.

Well, except for David, he has precisely the same excuse, but he’s not trying to poke wires in anybody’s ears.

Doctor Frankenstein calls for enough amperage to run three electric kettles (cite 3), then all the way up to two Titan RTX graphics cards before the head starts to get what appears to be a massive migraine. 

I know this expression well, migraines can feel very much like someone is subjecting me to unnatural horrors.

This is getting a little extreme, though. Yes, when the head starts pulsing, they realize they may have made a mistake. 

I’d say this was inexplicable behavior on their part, unbelievably hasty and foolish–and I will say it, actually, it deserves to be said. But in context, this is the team that did so little prep for entering the alien structure that they didn’t notice the giant fuckoff skull carved into the outside of it.

Knowing how much Shaw and Holloway read into the intentions of the Engineers from the depictions they found on Earth, they probably would’ve interpreted this as a good sign, somehow.

Anyway, they put a sneezeguard down over the head before it explodes.

Good job everyone. This is like what would’ve happened if Napoleon’s savants took one look at the Rosetta Stone and decided “maybe we should try hitting it with hammers. Surely that’ll make the knowledge fall out.”

From a horror perspective, this scene only works in two contexts: First, gross-out. Generally found in schlock, exploitation, and outsider art flicks, the tone of gross-out content can be highly variable, but there are two general trends I'd mention, which are of relevance to this movie.

First, gross-out tends to exist in that weird alternate space where lots of comedy movies do: characters will behave in unreasonable ways for no apparent reason. Within the film, this is treated as the universal norm, besides maybe a straight man character who highlights the absurdity. Gross-out is often like that, but pushes different boundaries of acceptable behavior than a traditional comedy.

This is, bafflingly, what Prometheus increasingly feels like. It feels like it's transitioning into gross-out schlock, and yet it never goes all the way.

Second: the audience for gross-out is largely self-selecting. If you're watching John Waters' Pink Flamingos, you expect things to get messy. You are looking forward to things getting messy. A head exploding is perfectly par for the course in gross-out horror. One might even be disappointed if there wasn't an exploding head.

But again, this movie was not marketed on gross-out. It was marketed as a tense, Alien-esque horror movie. If you followed that premise like I did, you're not in the theater to view a debauched spectacle, you're there for the movie to put a well-paced squeeze on the characters and your nerves, where half the horror comes from having the room to really think about how frightening the core concepts of the series are.

Does Alien involve some shocking gore? Sure does! But in Alien, Kane's fate is not there to make you laugh and exclaim "ewww!" at how far the film's gone, the film tries to make you very aware of how horrifying his demise is.

So, there's an alternate way this scene works, if you're coming in from that perspective. I don't think the movie intended this as much as the gross-out, but it's what I drew from it at the time: the scene works if you decide not to focus your sympathies on the human characters at all, or even David, and think about it from the perspective of the head. 

It’s patently impossible that what they did actually “woke up” the brain inside that skull. But if we sink to the movie’s level and entertain the idea for a moment, what in the hell have they just done to this Engineer? The last thing the head would’ve remembered was running, falling, decapitation, and then this. They just tortured this poor bastard for no adequately explained reason. There’s none! “I think we can trick the nervous system into thinking it's still alive” is the entirety of the explanation. It makes about as much sense and seems as thoughtlessly violent as anything in Mad God (2021, content warning for body horror). 

I already spent all my anger about desecrating bodies in the name of shambolic pseudoscience, I have no more rage to give for now. And similarly in the theater, I hit my limit. I’d already hit a different limit back when they landed the Prometheus on top of some archaeology, but now I’d fully given up on this movie being what I’d hoped it would be. 

The maddening thing that keeps me obsessed with it is that it keeps throwing random scraps of that hypothetical movie into the mix anyway, bouncing me like a yo-yo between scenes. 

But for right now, the yo-yo is still on the descent. Having exploded the first sample of alien biology ever touched by science, they apparently stuck some of it in a generic, science-y DNA machine. What does the DNA machine tell them? 

“DNA match”. 

The movie does not actually explain what this means. It thinks it does, but in a very vague and handwave-y way that ends up being even more hilarious than if they’d just been out-and-out wrong. Because this is what I do for a living, I want to science at this for a bit. 

But I’ve written enough about it for an entire post on its own, so that will wait until next time.

⛬ 

(Previous) | (Index) | (Next)

⛬ 

Citations for alt-text rambles, as well as some text-text rambles:

1. https://www.behance.net/gallery/78297841/Semiotic-Standard (contains a high-quality download for the symbols, should ye wish them for yourselves)

2. https://www.sculpturedepot.net/clay-wax-tools/product.asp?Steel_Tools 

3. Doctor Frankenstein calls for 30 amps first, then 40, then 50 in the space of several seconds. According to wikipedia, an electric kettle is about 16.6A, and a 288W high-performance graphics card would require 24A. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(current) That graphics card isn’t mentioned by name, but it matches up with the wattage reported by Tom’s Hardware for a Titan RTX (cite 4). Running with two of these things, you might be able to run 4k Ultra settings on some games without tanking your framerate. They could’ve been playing video games and seen way more exploding heads.

4. https://www.tomshardware.com/features/graphics-card-power-consumption-tested 

5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_(film)#Design

6. https://www.reddit.com/r/MovieDetails/comments/f4rf63/for_the_chestburster_scene_in_alien_1979_the/

7. https://i.pinimg.com/736x/8e/2f/9b/8e2f9b0716746aac7ce5b2f369bf4082--aliens--scene.jpg

8. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karyotype#Human_karyogram 

9. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centromere 

10. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centromere#Telocentric 

11. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_banding 

12. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proteinogenic_amino_acid 

13. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hula_language

#Prometheus 2012 #Prometheus (2012) #This movie is a study in so much tonal dissonance #It was so pretty and yet so broken #insert Benoit Blanc “compels me though” meme here

[seat-safety-switch]

You've probably read a bunch of crazy shit in the news lately about batteries. Batteries, and the stuff we make them out of, will decide whether or not we plunge into an eternal ecological hell or not. They are meant to be made in complicated factories by well-meaning scientists, always pushing the state of the art. Friends, I'm here to tell you that batteries aren't that complicated. You can just steal them from the grocery store.

However, it is true that a pack of AA batteries sequestered under your sweater is not enough to make a car go. Certainly, not enough to make it go very fast, even if you put the suckers in parallel (that's electronic engineer speak for "side by side.") No, we need a different battery technology. And that technology should be accessible to the common dirtbag like me, so that Big Business can't take it away from them like they did "electricity" and "open fires."

I bring to you: egg fart batteries. I got the idea a few years ago, when I noticed that my Volare's starter battery had cracked and was starting to piss acid all over the underside of the hood. It smelled like sulphur, just like egg farts. I don't think you need me to draw any thicker of a line between these two points. A few awful weekends in the shop later, and I now have a functional electric car powered entirely by renewable energy. Free, too, if you steal eggs from the grocery store.

It's pretty great: nobody tailgates me anymore in traffic, and I get to work without having to clean out my fuel filter on the side of the road every thirty miles. Sure, there are some dramatic downsides. Nobody can claim it's a zero-emission automobile, for one thing. We all have to do our part to save the world, though. For instance, we're gonna have to order like four more bennies each at brunch if we want to get home.

[redladydeath]

Some Vox human life headcanons that have been developing in my head over the past few weeks

He was born Vaughn Oxright in the late 1910’s/early 1920’s to a well-off, show-biz couple from Philadelphia

Was a child star from the ages of about 5 to 9, mostly doing live dance acts at mid-sized theaters across the US. That phase of his life was ended by a leg injury that never healed properly (neither he nor his parents wanted to slow down long enough for it to fully heal and he kept dancing on it until long-term damage was done), and his family had no choice but to settle back down in Philly.

First realized he was interested in men at age 11 when he became super attached to an older boy in his church’s youth group. He became very clingy and started sending the boy dozens of increasingly intense totally-not-love letters, which made the boy uncomfortable and got Vox switched out of the group. The fact that this was obviously a crush went unsaid, but not unnoticed by those involved. The rejection was devastating for Vox, and he swung hard into homophobia and petty displays of masculinity afterward.

He stayed out of show-biz during his teen years, but still participated in dozens of events and competitions— any opportunity to perform and receive praise.

Was drafted into WWII as a young man. Never saw combat on account of his old leg injury, but was instead assigned to work as an electrical engineer, building radar tech and other telecommunications materials. It was outside of his intended field of study, but he took to it quickly and became very close with the other men on his team. It was the last time in his life he could remember feeling truly happy.

Realized he was really, embarrassingly into BDSM (or at least the 40’s/50’s equivalent) via pulp novels, plus how excited he was made by the head of his team being cold/condescending towards him when he first joined. Took this secret to the grave, but always kept a stash of retro-style erotica wherever he was living.

After the war, he decided to get back into show business. Started dating and quickly married a girl from a wealthy, well-connected family. Things started off okay, but only took a few years to devolve into simmering animosity. He was self-absorbed and inattentive, she started using pills to cope. Neither of them had any interest in getting a divorce though, given the times and the damage it would do to both their reputations. They had two kids who were basically raised solely by their nanny. Their parents both loved them in their own ways, but were too wrapped up in themselves to pay them very much mind.

Vox quickly got involved in the television industry, using his good looks and charm to rapidly climb the ranks and land a job as a presenter. He was a pain to work with for anyone he deemed beneath him, but he was a great networker and could schmooze with the “important people” like nobody’s business.

Despite running in some pretty elite circles, his TV career never quite reached the heights he wanted it to. He was, objectively, quite successful, making good money and being the face of his own show, but he wanted to aim higher. He managed to finagle his way into a film role, hoping it would kick-start a new phase in his career, but despite being a great performer, Vox just wasn’t an actor. The film bombed. He didn’t take it well.

When he walked into the studio one day in the mid-50’s, ready to shoot another show, he had no idea it was to be his last day on Earth. He was just supposed to introduce a musical performance alongside his co-anchor, that was it. But for whatever reason, the crew decided that this time, they wanted them to do it using standing microphones. However, due to a mistake by one of the tech guys, Vox’s microphone was not properly grounded. When they started counting down and Vox put his hands on the mic, several hundred volts of electricity went coursing through his body. His heart stopped almost instantly. He didn’t have time to even register what had happened to him, just the sound of screams and the faint smell of burning flesh.

#mr tv man is setting up shop in my brain. please help #will probably come back and add early demon life headcanons too in a few days rip #redlady speaks #hazbin hotel #vox #hazbin hotel vox #vox hazbin hotel #hazbin vox #hazbin posting

[foxes-that-run]

The Prophecy

The Prophecy is about Taylor being sad to be alone, feeling like she is fated to be and pleading for it to end differently. It samples, or copies the melody of Stevie Nicks Landslide, which Harry has performed with Stevie twice, including on Taylor's birthday for the Fine Line release. Stevie also wrote a poem for TTPD.

In the Archer Taylor first touched on the idea that "All my Heroes die alone". Referring to her long love of famous couples and artists. In particular Burton and Taylor who she has likened herself and Harry to in Wildest Dreams, Ready for It, and in this record referred to again in 'Who's Afraid of Little Old Me?'. Harry has also likened them to another doomed couple of Joni Mitchell and Graham Nash in Canyon Moon. Here Taylor is pleading to have a happy ending, unlike these famous couples, similar to in Cardigan with "I knew you / Tried to change the ending / Peter losing Wendy"

Taylor also referenced the Perfect music Video in the Lyric Video. A song about ending their relationship and a song about being scared to end up alone.

Landslide

The Prophecy samples or copies the melody of Landslide. A song Stevie Nicks wrote, that established the sound of Fleetwood Mac. Stevie has said it is song was about her romance with bandmate Lindsey Buckingham and their career struggles, as well as her relationship with her business-executive father. Very similar to themes in TTPD and The Prophecy. This mash up of them is good.

Lyrics

(1, 2, 3) Hand on the throttle Thought I caught lightning in a bottle Oh, but it's gone again And it was written I got cursed like Eve got bitten Oh, was it punishment?

The count in is left in the final track, counting up and down is in many Haylor songs as lyrics

A throttle controls the air in an engine, here Taylor means she is slowing down. (In So High School's full throttle means full speed ahead, this is slowing down.

'Thought I caught lightening in the bottle, but it's gone again' is a rare feat, finding a thrilling love. There’s a connotation of wanting to hold onto and display something ephemeral. Gone again - Taylor thought had come back, but lost. (not a never eventuated love, or a long term one, but a thrilling one returned) it reminds me of:

The 1: "I thought I saw you at the bus stop, I didn't though"

Lighting is in 2 songs, both referring to Taylor, but also camera flashes in TIWYCF. Here the meaning is the rarest of electric loves.

Shake It Off: I never miss a beat, I’m lightning on my feet

This Is What You Came For: Baby, this is what you came for, lightning strikes every time she moves

The end of this verse is Taylor referring to a 'written' as in decided prophecy that she will end up alone. She feels cursed or that she is being punished and isn't allowed love.

Written is also a Haylor theme, and this line is reminiscent of 1D/Harry's Something Great "The script was written and I could not change a thing / I want to rip it all to shreds and start again"

Pad around when I get home I guess a lesser woman would've lost hope A greater woman wouldn't beg But I looked to the sky and said

Taylor didn't refer to 'woman' before Folklore, I think telling of maturity. As well as crushing, this lyric reminds me of Mastermind "You see, all the wisest women had to do it this way". Here Taylor sees her strength is keeping her going and willing to set aside dignity to plead for what she really.

Looked to the sky could be seen as prayer, or also clouds/sky appear in a lot of their videos. In Me! Taylor walks in clouds, Late Night Talking Harry falls from them. Story of My Life Harry says running after her is like chasing them. In Daylight Harry is climbing down from them and Lavender Haze in Eras she climbs up to them.

Please I've been on my knees Change the prophecy Don't want money Just someone who wants my company Let it once be me Who do I have to speak to About if they can redo The prophecy?

There is a thread in Taylors work of speaking about love like religion, here she is begging in much the same way she did in:

Don’t Blame Me: If you walk away I’d beg you on my knees to stay

This Love: Your smile, my ghost, I fell to my knees

The secret message of 1989's track 5, All You Had to do Was Stay was "they paid the price" which is a theme in 12 of Harry and Taylor's songs to each other. Most relevant to this lyric is MFASR on Harry's House, where Harry implored his muse to love him and not worry about their career:

Music for a Sushi Restaurant "I don't want you to get lost / I don't want you to go broke / I want you" and "I'm not going to get lost / I'm not going to go broke / Staying cool / (Know I love you, babe)"

Here Taylor is saying she doesn't want money (which she has an abundance of) she just wants someone to love her. (a gut punch indeed) It is a similar theme to But Daddy I love Him where Taylor felt she gave love up for her voice.

Cards on the table Mine play out like fools in a fable, oh It was sinking in Slow is the quicksand Poison blood from the wound of the pricked hand Oh, still I dream of him

In this verse Taylor is putting aside past pretences of being nonchalant and admitting she's stuck on a past love, trapped in a slow quicksand and cannot heal from the wound of losing them. It is densely packed with references to bear with me on this one.

Taylor has referred to hiding cards, and playing games with her muse in the past. Here she is putting them on the table and being honest. With fools (many mentions) in a fable (folklore) and a call back to Treacherous!!

Cards on the table, they were previously hidden by her or the muse in Say don't go: "I'm tryna see the cards that you won't show" (what a great call back for this song).

Slow is the quicksand, is a call back to Treacherous "And I'd be smart to walk away / But you're quicksand"

"Poison blood from the wound of the pricked hand" - what a lyric, I love it. Taylor is saying she has been wounded, she cannot heal from the loss.

Poison from a lover is in Getaway Car (He poisoned the well, I was lyin' to myself)

Blood is a Haylor theme that means a wound from love. I will go with Say Don't Go which is already this verse "Walk away and leave me bleedin', bleedin'?"

Finally hand is also a theme, with the imagery here I think she is saying her hand was wounded from holding it out. I like the prick reference which is, probably not intended, but reminds me of Kiwi "she goes home to a cactus" (a prick)

She still dreams of him, Dreams are in Wildest Dreams and Gold Rush "I can’t dare to dream about you anymore"

And I sound like an infant Feeling like the very last drops of an ink pen A greater woman stays cool But I howl like a wolf at the moon And I look unstable Gathered with a coven round a sorceress' table A greater woman has faith But even statues crumble if they're made to wait I'm so afraid I sealed my fate No sign of soulmates I'm just a paperweight In shades of greige Spending my last coin so someone will tell me It'll be ok Please

This verse is Taylor loosing hope and becoming more distraught. She refers to wolves and covens which appeared in the lyric video for out of the woods and willow respectively. She also has wolves in daylight:

Daylight “Maybe you ran with the wolves and refused to settle down”

She refers to earlier in the song where she compared herself to the idea of what a woman should do, here a greater woman would have faith. She ends with referring to other songs on the record with themes of griege and grey, describing herself as a paperweight. Although a billionaire saying her last coin is on the nose, the concept of her desperation to hear it will be ok is not.

#the prophecy #TTPD #Taylor Swift #Haylor #the tortured poets department

[mx-julien]

we should meet the village that raised Kai and Nya. how else did they learn to take care of themselves? we know they were left alone right around the ages of 8-10, and when we see them in the pilot they're self-sufficient and run a successful business

culture-wise, we're clued in that Ray and Maya are vaguely East Asian, so the reference I'll be using is the traditionally Japanese method of teaching kids independence. here's an overgeneralization:

that kids are taught to clean up after themselves from an early age and by the time their directional skills are OK they are sent on their first errand to (usually) a nearby store or shrine

you may be familiar with the idea from the series Old Enough! filmed in 1991 that showed Japanese kids on their first errands (currently it's on netflix)

brainstorming thread for this post on bluesky

even if we assume they were taught independence from an early age, they can't've known how to proficiently smith weapons or tools. they also have basic education in addition to Nya's knowledge of electrical engineering and welding. they must've had to apprentice under other blacksmiths in addition to going to school.

this would also explain why Kai is so fiercely, often illogically independent in the pilot and first season. he's spent the past decade of his life being helped by others, and he doesn't want to rely on anyone else if he can avoid it. in this new life as a ninja, he thinks, I can be completely independent. I won't have to rely on anyone! and thus begins his character development

let's explore "it takes a village"

farmers always give them their less attractive produce but refuse to take payment, telling the Smith kids that they're doing them a favor by taking the ugly ones. the local schoolhouse never approaches them about tuition.

neighbors by while their kid's taking a nap. they bring lunch or dinner, teach the two how to clean the house, and show them how to make the food they brought. caretakers at the village shrine ask them to help sweep away the leaves on the anniversary of their parent's disappearance. a few friends come by with flowers- it's a coincidence, they say: these wildflowers are just taking over my garden bed- it's no big deal.

electricians and welders in the area always seem to need an extra hand when Nya gets out of school. Kai cleans the blacksmith shop a few towns over and gets paid in an apprenticeship and a permanent stock of firewood and coal during the winter. the ice house happens to have unsellable, broken ice blocks when Nya pops by in the summer.

the two of them know. the village is part of a careful dance, respecting Kai and Nya's independence while acknowledging their need for support. everyone plays a part. yes, toes get stepped on and feelings get hurt, but time rolls on regardless. another person comes in from the sidelines when someone else takes a break.

it is not easy for the Smith kids, not by a long shot, but the people surrounding them make it bearable

as time marches on, their village sees the children they raised save the world dozens of times. occasionally, the Smith kids come back to take care of the shop and check in with everyone after avoiding the latest apocalypse.

without thinking, neighbors hand them a basket of misshapen apples, half a sack of broken rice, and trimmings from the butcher's. by the time each of them make it home, they've noticed their pockets jingling. the dance continues and now they've switched places

#should i write a longer bit on this? #ninjago #lego ninjago #kai smith #nya smith #ninjago pilots #ninjago season 1 #young kai smith #young nya smith #ninjago headcanons

[freakshowtwopointoh]

gen v limoreau normal college / punk band au

Marie is a music theater mechanical engineering double major. Jordan is in a grungy indie punk band with their friends. They accidentally book the same music room and begin helping each other. Marie helps Jordan sort an issue in the song they're writing, Jordan helps Marie deal with some engineering college logistics or something, and I'm thinking at a certain point, the band will ask marie to feature on a song because cate doesnt sing at all and jordan does not sing in their fem form in public ever. thats where the REAL ROMANCE BEGINS people. thinking the spring musical will be spring awakening or next to normal or something else edgy just because i like the idea of jordan overhearing marie singing something with curses or electric guitar or something and is like... i thought u were into musicals and marie is like... this is a musical. i thought u were educated.

vibes

yes powers but vought isnt bad.

Marie: Music theater mechanical engineer double major (i know someone who did this, shes a badass.)

Jordan: Mechanical Engineering Major, guitarist (also decided jordan is into cars in this one.)

Emma: Musical theater major w/ minor in dance, Marie's roommate

Luke: Music major, lead singer

Sam: Video Game Design major, graphic designer/cheerleader

Cate: Business major, manager/pianist

Andre: Business major, percussion

what i also like about this set up is the opportunities for drama

of course emma is in dance - her mom has strong dance mom vibes in the worst way.

not only does luke have the only music based major in the band which sets him up to be isolated from the others, but it also puts cate and andre in the same major to allow for shenanigans.

and then uve also got the tension of jordan being in engineering but not caring about anything but music and cars (i also know a person like this - he changed majors to film and then business, but in this case, jordan will push through of course, complaining all the way) it also means that their main friends are all in "softer"/"easier" majors which gives them a superiority complex and a chip on their shoulder

were going real punk for this band.

#jordan li #gen v #gen v prime #gen v fic #limoreau #jordan x marie #jordan li x marie moreau #marie x jordan #mariejordan #jordanmarie #gen v jordan #gen v fanfic #gen v fanfiction #gen v amazon #marie moreau #luke riordan #sam riordan #emma meyer #cate dunlap #andre anderson #gen v au #fanfic plot

[hatredmadeofgold]

honestly your take on my erotic machine samuraiden ask is so poetic and wonderful and I'm injecting it into my veins. but honestly I was also thinking about idk some repair type scenario and Raiden touches something on Sam's cybernetic arm and Sam, not used to this, involutarily makes a noise like that vine with the woman seeing the fake rat. I love the idea of inner workings being sensitive tbh.

Hey again :] Sorry for taking so long to answer these asks, I am very busy during weekdays sadly 😭

Hmmm well his cybernetic arm is a prosthetic, so it wouldn't be permanently attached to his organic body but I think that nanomachines connect the artificial nerves inside the arm to the brain, creating a perfect symbiosis between organic and inorganic. Repairing a prosthetic isn't something I could imagine anyone but a cybernetic engineer/orthopaedic technician do in that case. But Sam's prosthetic getting damaged badly during battle and Raiden checking on him and doing some sort of quick 'diagnosis' with his cybernetic eye, that I can see happening.

In real life, damaged nerves can become hyper- or hyposensitive, depends on what, how, where, and also how the recovery goes. For Sam's arm being a prosthetic, inorganic and organic have to match perfectly. In my last response to you, I already explained that for a combat cyborg to have the highest efficiency, they'd need the identical sensory input of that of a human, maybe even enhanced input. We get our sensory input from the nerves of our body. So the same logic can be applied to Sam's prosthetic arm. We have seen what he can do with it, the movement speed and accuracy are incredible.

Raiden of course isn't so gentle with Sam in general. Even shows that sadistic side of his — he's both a sadist and a masochist in my book; enjoying pain only when he can inflict even more pain to the other in return — and he 'accidentally' touches an open laying artificial nerve of the damaged arm while checking the damage.

Now, those open laying artificial nerves in Sam's arm could be hypersensitive. It's overwhelming and painful even. Add also into the mix that I think of Sam as a masochist (him being sadistic is more of a persona, not a part of who he really is), so the noise he makes is a mix of shock, and pain, but also a bit of pleasure. Not that Sam would ask for Raiden to do that again of course, they are both too proud to admit such things out loud. As long as they are sober at least.

But I believe that Sam hadn't been taught of the complexity of the cybernetic, or how they work in perfect sync with his body, aside from the part with the nanomachines maybe — hence the surprised response to the sensitivity. Raiden knows that Sam gets off to pain (but that wouldn't stop him even if he didn't know either).

Perhaps teases him about his lack of knowledge about the inner workings of his prosthetic arm. Maybe that can be code for "I know you enjoy that when I hurt you" that Sam knows to interpret that way.

It's unfortunate that MGR didn't pick up Raiden's lightning powers from MGS4 again, but I do imagine that he still has them.

Now in other areas of the damage, the artificial nerves could be hyposensitive. Imagine Raiden using his lightning powers to send electric shocks through Sam's arm. He says that he needs to test "if the sensors still respond at all", but Raiden doesn't know how to fix a prosthetic like Sam's either — it's just some bullshit to tell Sam that he's going to play with him a little bit for his own entertainment and pleasure. But in fact, the electric shocks that go through the artificial muscles and nerves go directly into Sam's pleasure centre, and he's struggling hard to not let that show. Again, his pride is at stake here, they are out in the open and either of them could be interrupted by a codec call. Not exactly a situation in which he wants to get caught being a horribly turned on mess.

Perhaps Raiden might continue messing with Sam until he gets him to that point where he cannot keep up his act, and Sam is an incredible actor, so that takes a lot to break it.

I could take this further and write an entire detailed scenario of them fucking during field work because of injuries and the analysis of the damage, and nanopaste only being used after the climax has been reached but oh well. Might put that on my idea list for smut for later.

Some last commentary that isn't directly relevant to the topic:

Although the lore of MGR says that a cyborg's move set is nothing more than new program code, I doubt Sam would rely solely on that. All of Sam's skill as a swordsman is entirely that of his own, not something a program code could replicate. Decision making and muscle memory go hand in hand after all. Cyborgs relying entirely on their bodies following their programming might also be why he could defeat them so easily... 😉

I also do not believe in the metal boob thing that fanon came up with. Concept art and screenshots alone show that it's a part of the suit, not part of his actual body. Also from a medical perspective, it would be completely unnecessary and also batshit insane to touch the surface area of the torso, remove skin and muscle tissue for some shiny but otherwise useless metal piece when the affected area is Sam's right forearm. Because the shape of the metal part also doesn't suggest that it replaces the muscles that connect the chest and arm muscles. It is purely there for aesthetics.

Anyway, it's fun answering these asks 💕 So feel free to drop in any more ideas, suggestions, prompts. I can ramble about these two for hours, it's a huge passion of mine c:

#samuraiden #Jetstream Sam #Raiden #Raiden MGR #MGR #metal gear rising #metal gear rising revengeance #mgrr #Raiden MGS #anon #ask #long post

[radykalny-feminizm]

Hedy Lamarr (born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler; November 9, 1914 – January 19, 2000) was an Austro-Hungarian-born American actress and technology inventor. She was a film star during Hollywood's Golden Age.

Although Lamarr had no formal training and was primarily self-taught, she invested her spare time, including on set between takes, in designing and drafting inventions, which included an improved traffic stoplight and a tablet that would dissolve in water to create a flavored carbonated drink.

During the late 1930s, Lamarr attended arms deals with her then-husband arms dealer Fritz Mandl, "possibly to improve his chances of making a sale." From the meetings, she learned that navies needed "a way to guide a torpedo as it raced through the water." Radio control had been proposed. However, an enemy might be able to jam such a torpedo's guidance system and set it off course. When later discussing this with a new friend, composer and pianist George Antheil, her idea to prevent jamming by frequency hopping met Antheil's previous work. In that earlier work, Antheil attempted synchronizing note-hopping in an avart-garde piece involving multiple synchronized player pianos. Antheil's idea in the piece was to synchronize the start time of identical player pianos with identical player piano rolls, so the pianos would be playing in time with one another. Together, they realized that radio frequencies could be changed similarly, using the same kind of mechanism, but miniaturized.

Based on the strength of the initial submission of their ideas to the National Inventors Council (NIC) in late December 1940, in early 1941 the NIC introduced Antheil to Samuel Stuart Mackeown, Professor of Electrical Engineering at Caltech, to consult on the electrical systems.

Lamarr hired the Los Angeles legal firm of Lyon & Lyon to search for prior art, and to draft the application for the patent which was granted as U.S. Patent 2,292,387 on August 11, 1942, under her legal name Hedy Kiesler Markey.

In 1997, Lamarr and Antheil received the Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award and the Bulbie Gnass Spirit of Achievement Bronze Award, given to individuals whose creative lifetime achievements in the arts, sciences, business, or invention fields have significantly contributed to society.

In 2014, Lamarr and Antheil were posthumously inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

#radfem #radical feminism #radfem safe #radblr #radfems do interact #feminism #radfems do touch #women's rights #women's liberation #adult human female #hedy lamarr #old hollywood #go #hollywood's golden age #women in stem #women in science #female inventor #female scientists #herstory #women in history #female genius #feminist #female scientist

[sorenphelps]

I've hopped on to the rockstar AU bandwagon so hard that I just had to make more fanart, which somehow turned into a full post explaining further the scoring chart and my detailed Marauders Band AU headcanons with a lot of sample music linked!! It's long so I hid it under the cut, enjoy and please share your thoughts, I'm desperate!

Sirius has a powerful, deep, and a little raspy voice, with quite a large vocal range (might have minor difficulties with the very high notes). He can play a lot of musical instruments: guitars (acoustic, electric, bass), piano, and drums if it’s absolutely necessary. He picked up a tiny little bit of violin too from his brother, and tried some wind instruments too, but never really got the hang of them. His preferred style of music is all kind of rock, but he is opened to new genres. He is an adequate composer, but he is prone to overdramatize his works and lyrics, his real talent is his charismatic vocals. Samples: x x x x x

Remus has a softer singing voice with an average range, generally higher than Sirius’ and not as charismatic. His kind of music is more alternative and chill (sexy even), focusing more on the actual technicalities and lyrics. He can play a cello (electric too) and a bass guitar perfectly, and he learned how to play other instruments too, so he would feel “caught up” to his friends’ levels (even though he is the most proficient bass player ever, and his lyrics are basically high-end poetry, which can be paralleled by only Sirius on his best days). He likes to incorporate unconventional solutions to his music (e.g. autotune effects, weird traditional instruments, etc.). Samples: x x x x x

James is bad at singing, he has a very average voice with quite a small vocal range if any. However, he can play a lot of musical instruments (his preference being the drums) and is a talented sound engineer. He is the best composer among his friends, he has the most experimental style. He has very creative ideas, and is best at helping his friends to make music together, enhancing their individual strengths and transforming their shared talent into something better. Samples (including a bonus collab he composed for Lily & Sirius and a collab with Remus): x x x x x x x

Lily has a very feminine, soft and even angelic voice, which is best paired with either a folk-ish alternative music style or rock/metal. She has the kind of voice, which just enhances any “epic” music with heavy guitar riffs or drum solos, basically anything, which is just very characteristic and theatrical by its own, and would be very overwhelming if for example Sirius would sing in them with his also very charismatic and powerful vocals. Lily is a very skilled piano player and singer with a wide vocal range, her songs are usually get picked as soundtrack for fantasy video games. Samples: x x x x x

Peter is more interested in classical music and the business side of music, he is a surprisingly adept talent scout and manager. As he is missing a finger, the musical instruments he could play is very limited. He is secretly a very skilled opera singer however. Samples: x x x

#marauders #sirius black #remus lupin #james potter #lily evans #peter pettigrew #fanart #art by lau #lau draws with a tablet #rockstar au #band au

[distantlaughter]

‘I want to do something significant’: ex-F1 champion Nico Rosberg on his sustainable entrepreneurship

originally published by Joanna Partridge for The Guardian 13 June 2023 (x)

The former elite driver has changed lanes from fossil-fuel-guzzling track cars to green investing and environmentally friendly racing.

In a parallel world, former Formula One world champion Nico Rosberg could be sitting at home in Monaco with his feet up, having set himself up for life, all before the tender age of 32.

After clinching the world championship in 2016, beating his rival Lewis Hamilton in the process, Rosberg shocked the world of motor sport by promptly quitting the pursuit that had been his life since starting competitive racing at the age of six.

Like many sports stars who retire relatively early, he has moved into punditry, commentating for Sky, but unusually he also appears to have effortlessly switched lanes from professional sportsman to entrepreneur, investor and philanthropist.

Sipping sparkling water in a hotel overlooking Hyde Park, the German-Finnish former champion has “got used” to talking about his retirement, despite being just 37. “I am so incredibly lucky,” he admits. “Thanks to the racing, I have financial freedom and I can do whatever I want.”

Despite sporting a tan, relaxed expression and understated navy clothing, Rosberg reveals a glimpse of a sportsman’s inner drive when he explains his motivation: “I want to do something significant, I want to contribute and I want to grow.

“I was always inspired by people who took that entrepreneurial path, investing to support or create something.” He rules out a return to racing, stressing he wants to use “the legacy of that, for my new endeavours”.

Rosberg now employs 15 people to work on his business and investment affairs, and his new endeavours include brand ambassador roles for German energy company EnBW – where he is the face of its electric charging network – and logistics provider Jungheinrich, but he describes himself on professional networking site LinkedIn as a “sustainability entrepreneur and angel investor”.

Rosberg has previously spoken about how he only gained a broader perspective on life after stepping off the international Formula One merry-go-round. Perhaps surprisingly, given his background in a fossil-fuel-guzzling sport, Rosberg now speaks with the zeal of a convert about sustainability and the importance of drawing attention to the climate crisis, something he admits he gave little thought to during his racing career.

This passion led him to found the Greentech festival, along with engineers and entrepreneurs Marco Voigt and Sven Krüger, in 2019. This year’s conference starts on Wednesday in Berlin, and the event is described by the organisers as a “global platform for pioneering and sustainable ideas”.

Rosberg says his wealth has afforded him the luxury to focus on these new interests, including investing in sustainability-focused startups, while also creating an endowment for his “grandchildren” (he and his wife’s two children are seven and five).

Indeed, one reason for this trip to London was a meeting with charitable foundation the Wellcome Trust, one of the UK’s largest philanthropic investors, known for its track record of impressive financial returns.

Forbes puts Rosberg’s net worth at just over $20m (£16m), although this seems a conservative estimate, given the earning power of the world’s elite racing drivers. He admits to having “software” that provides him with an exact figure, but will not be drawn on what that is, other than adding: “The top F1 driver earns $40m a year.”

Another of his ventures presumably comes with the need for deep pockets: He owns Rosberg X Racing, a team in the new environmentally conscious motor sport Extreme E. Now in its third season, the series sees electric off-road SUVs race in different locations around the globe that have been affected by the climate crisis.

The teams, each comprising a male and a female driver, are racing this season across five locations, from Saudi Arabia to Scotland, and Italy to the Americas. In an effort to limit their environmental impact, the series’ vehicles, logistics equipment and infrastructure are shipped, rather than flown, around the world aboard the St Helena, a former Royal Mail ship. The races are televised, but take place without spectators.

Rosberg’s team, now third in the standings, is sponsored by IG Prime, a division of financial brokerage IG, among others, and is considered an evolution of Team Rosberg, the motor sport outfit founded in the 1990s by his father, Keke. Other Extreme E team founders include Hamilton and former British Formula One driver Jenson Button.

The series claimed a global audience of 135 million in 2022, more than 30% up on viewership during its inaugural season. However, this pales into insignificance compared with Formula One, riding high and growing its fanbase, especially in the US.

Rosberg hopes Extreme E entertains viewers, while getting them to “do their part, and contribute, and think about their own lives” amid the climate crisis.

Rosberg says his own car is an all-electric Audi e-tron, extolling the virtues of the charging network in mainland Europe – and says he does not “like it any more” if he is collected by a fossil fuel-powered car when travelling abroad. He also says he takes the train in Germany, but skirts over whether he flies by private jet.

His focus on sustainability extends to his investment portfolio, which does not contain any oil, tobacco or defence companies. However, he is at something of a loss to explain the involvement in Extreme E of Saudi Arabia, which hosted the first race of the season, but is also the world’s biggest producer of fossil fuels, and home to the world’s biggest oil company, Saudi Aramco, which is 95% government-owned. “I would understand that there are some people, where it doesn’t sit too well with them,” Rosberg says. “All our partners in Extreme E are allowing us to do a lot of good, which we are very grateful for.

“Sometimes you need to go out there a little bit to do a lot of good.”

After the regimented existence of his early years, where his job determined his timetable, Rosberg clearly relishes being his own boss. He vociferously rules out a future return to Formula One, whether as a driver or running a team: “Never, ever, ever, because I value my freedom,” he says. “It was very intense.”

Rosberg still watches all the Formula One races but confesses the experience is not relaxing: “When the lights go off, I imagine I’m there.”

Few would imagine that investing could produce the same high, but he insists he has other ways to get his adrenaline fix: “In business, and on the tennis court.”

CV

Age: 37

Family: Married, with two young children

Education: International School of Monaco

Pay: Undisclosed. “My income comes from representing brands, I am the face of the biggest electric [vehicle] charging infrastructure in Germany from EnBW, and Jungheinrich, the logistics mobility provider. That is one important source of income for me.” He says his income comes from representing brands, his investments in startups yet to deliver significant returns.

Last holiday: Ibiza, where his family has a holiday home and owns an ice-cream parlour. “It’s our favourite place to go.”

Best advice he’s been given: “My father said: ‘You always meet twice in life.’”

Biggest career mistake: “Investing into a great idea, but where the founders were not 100% convincing.”

Word he overuses: “Big bang,” according to his assistant Lena. He adds: “We talk about building reputation … I like to think in ‘big bang’ stories, such as winning the Extreme E championship.”

How he relaxes: Playing tennis; “I am average good.”

#nico rosberg #nicology #lowkey gagged him with the saudi and private jet prodding

[gumnut-logic]

The Best Defence

Just a little scene sparked by a lovely ask by @onereyofstarlight off the Little Whump List - sleep fog. It went in an interesting direction. It's not much, but it is something.

I hope you enjoy it. :D

-o-o-o-

Gordon really should have known better.

“Goooooood morning, Traaaaacy Islaaand!” At the top of his voice at what he considered the decent hour of 7am - c’mon, it is a full two hours after he actually got out of bed.

He should have known better, but then he didn’t realise Virgil was in the comms room at the time.

Virgil.

You know, his heavy lifting, 2am - 2pm if he can get it, hibernating bear of a brother.

The one who didn’t appear to have sourced his coffee but for some reason was trying to put his boots on in the middle of the room, minus his socks, concentrating enough to carve a permanent ‘V’ in his forehead when the left boot would not go on his right foot.

Gordon stopped in his tracks.

The snort from Dad’s desk in the form of the ghost of his eldest brother who had obviously been up all night was derisive only added to the confusion on his second eldest brother’s face as to why that boot still wouldn’t fit onto his foot.

Frozen, in the middle of the floor staring at both brothers, Gordon’s brain did the calculations, checked the time of year and what his brothers had been doing the night before and came to the horrific conclusion that, not only had Scott been up all night, but so had Virgil. except Virgil had crashed on the couch - never a comfortable option - probably at about the time Gordon waltzed past this morning for his swim, because that was the time where late night met early morning and all heavy lifting engineers still up tended to fall on their faces and shouldn’t be disturbed until sometime around sunset.

Virgil was growling at his boot.

When this happened, the best place to be was anywhere but here.

Any moment the situation would erupt and he would be toast.

Caught without cover or an easy flee, he rolled his shoulders and…the best defence…

“What the hell do you two think you are doing?”

Both big brothers startled as if he had stuck them with an electric prod.

Scott recovered first. “Gordon? What?”

He took a step forward. “Did you stay up all night?”

“Uh.” Scott’s response was almost as sluggish as Virgil’s - who was staring at Gordon as if he couldn’t identify exactly which brother it was who had pissed him off.

“Bed.” Gordon pointed a very firm finger in the direction of the elevator. “Now.”

That woke up Scott enough to have him poking at the contents of the desk as if he was attempting to look busy. He shook his head. “No, no, I need to get these evaluations in…I …” Something caught his eye on a flimsy and he frowned.

“Nope. Not gonna work, Scotty. I’m under orders to make sure you sleep well and, when Virgil isn’t available, to drag your ass to bed at a decent time.”

“Virgil is available!” Yeah, that’s how many of Scott’s neurons were fried - when questioned by an angry fish, he points at a far more dangerous angry bear as a defence. Great strategy there, big brother.

“Are you kidding me? Virgil is not available.” Gordon waved a hand at his brotherly engineer. “He obviously can’t engineer which boot goes on which foot, much less drag you anywhere.”

“Hey!”

“No, I’m calling it. Bed, both of you.”

“Gordon…”

“NOW!”

They all jumped, including Gordon. Wow, the acoustics of the comms room did a great job.

Give it all, and then follow it through. Dad definitely had some good ideas. “Do I need to call in Grandma?”

Both big brothers flinched.

“Do I?”

Virgil was staring at him as if he had grown a third head.

Scott blinked.

But as if a switch had been flipped, Virgil suddenly stood up, still barefoot, and, stumbling as if sleep walking, beelined for Scott.

“Crap.” It was whispered and Gordon had a very strong suspicion that he wasn’t supposed to hear that one word cross his eldest brother’s lips. Scott backed away from the desk and stood up as Virgil approached like a lumbering finality.

“Bed.” Echoing that one word with a blunt baritone, Virgil grabbed a bicep and began dragging Scott towards the elevator.

“Virgil, I’m fine. Let go!”

“No, you said that two hours ago. Bed, now!”

It was Gordon’s turn to blink as his brothers staggered past, determined, as if drunk on either little sleep or none at all.

Idiots.

Beloved idiots. It was probably for a good reason and it was obvious Virgil had been doing his best to get Scott to bed but had crashed before any success.

After all the engineer had been with Gordon all day yesterday out on a rescue. But while Gordon had slept, Virgil had tackled Scott…and failed.

A flash of guilt twisted Gordon’s smile a little. Perhaps he should have helped Virgil.

Perhaps.

But that could be worked out later. Now there was sleep to be had.

The elevator doors closed and suddenly Gordon was alone.

He blinked, staring at the empty room…and realised exactly what he had just managed to do. His face split into a grin.

The best defense…

-o-o-o-

#thunderbirds are go #thunderbirds #thunderbirds fanfiction #gordon tracy #virgil tracy #scott tracy #nuttyfic

[mourntheantagonist]

Trigonometry

Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5 | Chapter 6

warning: explicit. check ao3 for detailed tag list

read on ao3

8:05 p.m.

That was the time flashing red in her face from the clock sitting on the side table next to the television. She sat with her back towards Steve, feet propped up on the sofa, resting her head against his side, her stare darting back and forth between the clock and the door.

8:05 p.m.

They told Billy to be at Steve’s house at eight.

Sure, it had only been five minutes—three hundred seconds exactly. It was a short enough amount of time to be explained away by a long stoplight or an inconveniently placed elderly driver.

Steve was rubbing his hand up and down her arm, and she knew he could feel how tense she was. Though, it wasn’t hard to be able to tell that considering Steve wouldn’t stop acknowledging it.

“Relax,” he said, “I’m sure he’s on his way.”

Nancy just kept looking at the clock. 8:06 now.

“He should be here already.” she grumbled.

Steve laughed, and it annoyed her just a bit how he was so unbothered by the situation. But, she also appreciated it, a little. At least one of them had to be the voice of reason. She had no idea what she would do if Steve was bouncing off the walls like he typically did when he was nervous or excited by something. She wondered if the fact that he wasn’t should concern her, but she was far too busy staring at the clock to hold any other concern.

“Not everyone can be as punctual as you, Nance.”

Nancy just curled further into his side, bringing her hand up to rest on his chest, feeling his heart beating hard. He was nervous too. He just wasn’t showing it. “Well,” she said, tilting her head back so she could see Steve’s face, “if he doesn’t show, we can still have fun just the two of us.”

Her voice sounded sincere, which meant Steve wouldn’t have noticed the way her own words filled her with dread. She loved Steve. That part hadn’t changed. But, there was something about the idea of just moving on with their relationship after all that happened that made her feel a little sick. Maybe it was just Billy’s words still ringing in her ear, still clinging to her skin, unable to be shaken or washed off. Maybe it wasn’t that, though. Maybe it was just her and her own infatuation with Billy. Maybe it was her own desire for something more that made the thought of going without the experience something that made her feel just slightly ill.

She needed Billy to show up. It was far more than a want. That was why she kept staring between the clock and the door. She needed him to show up because she didn’t know what she would do otherwise.

The sound of the Camaro’s engine saved her from entering that spiral.

It was almost embarrassing the speed at which she shot up from her seat, severing the physical connection between her and Steve as she got up from the couch and rushed over to the front window.

The headlights poured in through the glass, the car facing head on and the rays hitting her directly in the eyes and forcing her to look away. She knew she looked just like a dog waiting for the mailman to show up—judging by Steve’s laughs anyway—and she didn’t care. He was late, she was impatient, and Steve just seemed to be going with the motions.

The way Billy got out of the car sent something like electricity through her. It was a shocking sensation that ran through her veins and gave her heart something of a kickstart, beating rapidly at the sight of Billy’s mere presence in Steve’s driveway.

8:08 p.m.

He was there. It was happening.

Nancy felt stuck in place in her spot in front of the window. She felt like her feet had been nailed into the floor, and the palm of her hand had been glued to the curtain that she had firmly gripped. Steve was the one who opened the door, before Billy had even so much as set foot on the porch, still standing closer to his car than the entryway.

She watched from the window as Billy dragged the tip of his tongue against his top row of teeth.

“Waiting up for me I see.” he said, his lips smacking together, and Nancy felt her face flush, and an overwhelming urge to hide herself behind the curtains. “Sorry I’m late. I had some trouble leaving the house.”

Steve didn’t respond to that in a way that Nancy could tell. She couldn’t see him from her angle behind the window. He stood directly in her blindspot. But, he must have done something nonverbal to warrant the jump in Billy’s step as he closed the distance between his car and the front door.

Nancy quickly backed herself away from the window and rushed back over to the couch, trying to act as natural as possible, hoping that Billy was just too enthralled with her boyfriend to notice her standing in the window just two feet to the left of him. She sat down, made herself look somewhat comfortable by bringing her feet up on the cushions and leaning her back into the pillows, looking anywhere but the front door where the party of two was about to become a party of three.

Billy shrugged himself of his jacket the second he walked through the door and tossed it onto the back of a chair, and somehow he was appearing to be more comfortable than Nancy looked on the couch, and she was trying really, really hard.

However comfortable Billy was in that moment would quickly start to fade as the seconds ticked by, and the three of them remained in a dimly lit living room in complete silence. Nancy could tell he was growing tense by the subtle fall of his grin, and the seemingly subconscious attempt to pull against a sleeve that was no longer there. She couldn’t blame him. Behind her own closed lips she was clenching her teeth. Steve was sporting his typical stress-induced shaky and neurotic demeanor.

“Should we, umm…” Steve’s voice cracked, and Nancy had to swallow a laugh because the last time she heard that voice out of Steve, she was fifteen and Steve was tripping over himself trying to ask her to catch a movie with him at The Hawk.

Steve cleared his throat and finished his sentence. “Should we head upstairs to my room?” he asked, and the blush on his cheeks was comparable to a tomato, but at the very least his voice was without any high pitched variations that time.

Billy stood awkwardly in between the couch and Steve, and Nancy could actually feel the vibrations coming from Billy’s erratically tapping foot. “Aren’t you gonna buy me dinner first?” he asked, and the tone of his voice and the look on his face told an entirely different story than the one his toes were telling. Neither of them were sure what that story was exactly, but the words were enough to put both herself and Steve into a state of alarm. Feeding Billy a nice meal as foreplay was not a part of their little plan.

“Uhh,” Steve’s eyes were wide, and if you couldn’t tell he was nervous before, he was wearing that fact like a neon sign right about now. “We uh, we don’t—”

“Holy fuck. I was kidding.”

Billy was looking at the two of them like they were being ridiculous, but also, appearing like he was truly on a level playing field—nervous out of his mind, and having absolutely no idea where any of this was supposed to be going. Nancy could only wish there were instructions. She wished it had been like one of her science labs. Step, by step, by step with precise measurements and detailed actions in a specific order. It made things easy, and it kept her from messing up, and potentially causing any lethal explosions in chemistry class.

Nancy pushed herself up off the couch, finally meeting the two boys somewhere close to eye level, rather than two feet below being smothered by the couch cushions. She brushed out the wrinkles in her clothes, which was pointless but a force of habit, and she tried to let her body find ease. She just reminded herself that the two standing before her were Steve and Billy, and despite what reputation would have her believe, she had nothing to be afraid of.

“Upstairs then?” Nancy finally spoke, realizing just as she said it that she hadn’t said a word since Billy had arrived. It was weird. He made her into a person she couldn’t recognize. She was shy, in a way, and nobody had ever made her feel that small. She wasn’t totally sure if that was because Billy was bigger than her, or because the situation they were in was just massive.

Billy nodded, and it was then that Nancy knew that it was the situation that was making her feel so small, because Billy looked to be even smaller.

Steve led the way, and Nancy made note of the way his head was hung towards the floor, staring straight down at his feet and intently watching as he took each step. It was as if his main focus was avoiding the possibility of tripping and making a fool of himself.

Billy followed behind Steve. It was Nancy who was trailing behind, and she was partly hoping that her distance would allow enough time for the tension to die down and the awkwardness to fade just enough for it all to finally start.

She had thought it would be easier. The way it had been described to her, albeit, in the vague details of the original encounter that she managed to get out of Steve and Billy, it was easy. Steve had gone in for the kill, barely any hesitation, and no lead up. There wasn’t any chit chat, or breaking of the ice. That’s sort of what she was hoping for—a desperate display of horniness that happened so quick that she wouldn’t have the time to think twice and run away.

When they got upstairs and walked into the room, it was like they’d all just been pushed out onto a stage with the curtains already drawn without a script in hand. Hell, they didn’t even know what play they were performing.

Nancy just took a deep breath and walked herself over to Steve’s desk chair beside the bed, sitting down and trying her best to get comfortable, or at the very least seem comfortable.

The two boys were still standing by the doorway, completely silent and stiff as boards. Steve’s chest visibly rose as he turned around to shut the door, turning back around once secured and leaning all of his weight into it.

It was weird, Nancy thought. They never closed the door when it had been just the two of them. Steve’s parents were never home when they did it, and they rarely ever ran the risk of any surprise visits. The house was always completely empty aside from themselves.

All of those things remained true, and yet, Nancy was relieved to have it shut. It felt safer, in a way. She already felt so exposed, so any extra bit of cover she could get was something she would cling onto.

Steve must’ve felt the same.

A few seconds they stood there unmoving, each of them waiting on the other to initiate. Nancy just waited, watching like a movie scene unfolding. It wasn’t her place to do anything anymore. The ball was in their court.

Steve eventually made that first move, which was shocking, to say the least. Billy never seemed to be the type to follow another person’s lead.

Steve reached out a hand, like an olive branch, and Billy just stared at it confused, but took it anyway, as if curiosity had overpowered him. Steve led him over to the foot of the bed, and Nancy felt her breath get caught in her throat when the backs of Billy’s knees hit the mattress. Somehow the four feet in travel from the door to the bed felt so fast, and their mere proximity to the bed felt like they were sitting right on the precipice.

That was what she wanted right? Quick, and easy?

Billy seemed to have other ideas, or rather, his mind did. Because consciously or not, Billy couldn’t look away from her.

“What is—” he spoke weakly, and it was a tone she never thought she’d hear coming out of a vessel that stood as tall and proud as Billy Hargrove did. It was shy and small and powerless. “What is this? W-What are we doing? What is she—”

Perhaps they should have talked about it in more detail with him. But, honestly, they didn’t think they’d have to. Billy had seemed perfectly comfortable when first propositioned, and if his reputation was anything to go by, they figured Billy would be the one taking the lead, and guiding them.

It was quickly revealing itself that they had grossly misjudged him.

It was the first time Nancy felt the need to intervene, or at least provide a helping hand in the right direction, because Billy was lost, and Steve couldn’t pinpoint his location.

“Just relax,” she said, putting more effort than ever into how relaxed she herself looked, because how was she going to say that without walking the walk. “I’m just going to be here. You two get to do your own thing.”

Billy’s facial expression could only be described As dumbfounded. He just kept looking back and forth between Steve and herself, seemingly waiting for the answer to a question he couldn’t ask.

Luckily, Nancy thought she might have the answer.

“It’s okay, Billy.”

Billy managed to take his eyes off of Nancy for long enough to look back at Steve, who was quickly learning from Nancy. He gave Billy a soft smile and nodded his head.

“It’s okay,” he said.

Miraculously, that seemed to relax Billy. Not by much, but she made a note of how his fists stopped clenching.

Somehow, as the time passed, the two of them had created a good amount of distance.

Steve was the one to initiate closing that said distance, slowly, barely conceivable movements bringing him from point A to point B.

Their stance was awkward from her point of view. Steve stood in front of Billy, who had his back to the bed. Their bodies were clearly still uncomfortable and Nancy didn’t fail to notice the way Billy’s eyes continued to dart in her direction, despite everything.

Steve didn’t fail to notice either.

With a visibly gentle hand, Steve brought his fingers up to Billy’s chin, pulling his gaze away from her, and centering it back on himself. The shorter distance they once had began to lessen even more as Steve made use of his other hand, placing it just above Billy’s hip and snaking it to the small of his back. Over a short period of time, their bodies went from the initial distant with inorganic postures, to pressed up against each other, chest to chest, but at least in the case for Billy, still unrelaxed, eyes still straining to look over at Nancy.

Steve—to Nancy’s surprise—was the more relaxed one between the two, and he was also the one doing a much better job at pretending she wasn’t even there. Nancy’s head was tilted as she watched, looking intently into the eyes of her boyfriend as he stared at Billy. His deep brown eyes were locked in on the blonde. His mouth was hung open just barely, his jaw relaxed and his lips soft with a hint of drool.

She felt her stomach start to tingle at the sight of the scene, and as each second passed and the two grew closer and closer, the urge to look away grew stronger. It felt like she wasn’t meant to be seeing it. Hell. She wasn’t meant to be seeing it. None of this was normal. Normally, when two people had sex, there wasn’t a third person just sitting on the sidelines, watching the whole thing like a movie. Well, at least not usually to their knowledge anyway.

There must be fun in it, she could imagine. The thrill of putting on a show, being wild and carefree and completely unbothered by the fact that someone else was watching. But, Nancy found there to be more of a thrill in being the third party. It was like when she was in middle school and she’d stumbled upon one of her mom’s Cosmos, knowing the second that she found it that she was supposed to look away, but finding her eyes simply glued to the page. She was being naughty, and there was just something so exciting about that. If reading a Cosmopolitan was considered naughty, well, what she was doing with Steve and Billy should be illegal.

Even more thrilling.

Just like when she was twelve years old sitting in her closet and flipping through the pages of a magazine, she couldn’t pull her eyes away. It was as if time itself had stopped, and they had frozen in place with just how slow they were going, and Nancy could feel the anticipation growing in her stomach just waiting for that electrical circuit to connect.

It was so gentle, and soft, and she could almost feel it too. She could see the way Billy’s breath had hitched when Steve’s lips had landed. His wide eyes had grown even wider and his body had stiffened like a board and she had to wonder what she’d missed, because Nancy Wheeler was good at reading people, and she’d never expect that sort of reaction out of Billy.

But then, the dust settled, and Billy’s seemingly terrified look had sunk into the warmth of Steve. His eyes fell shut as if it were by force of gravity. His body became loose, his hands moved away from his sides, and it was clear to Nancy that Billy was no exhibitionist, but he could quickly fall into the illusion that they were alone. Nancy understood that. She’d experienced that before. Steve really had a way of making one feel like they were the only two people left in the world.

Billy had clearly fallen for it, hook, line, and sinker.

Billy was the one to deepen the kiss, those trailing hands moving up along Steve’s sides until they were cupping his cheeks. It was all consuming. Every last exhale of air and little noise that Steve produced Billy swallowed with his kiss. His grip on Steve was visibly tense—the white of his knuckles and the deep canyons in Steve’s cheeks made by the pressure under Billy’s fingers telling her so. Steve’s head was moving as if he was swimming, deep in the sea, searching for something. It seemed as though Steve had control of the movements, while Billy maintained control of the kiss.

It seemed that way, until suddenly their vertical stance had drifted to something more horizontal, with Billy falling flat on his back in one swift movement, something graceful. Billy still had his hands firmly latched onto Steve’s face, and suddenly Steve was the one who was wide-eyed. It seemed that Billy had taken over control.

The kissing quickly became less soft, and more frantic. A sloppy exchange of tongues with the corners of each other’s lips pulling tight against their will. It was desperate. Billy had his hand firmly latched into the hair on Steve’s head, as if he was afraid he’d try and run away. Nancy had felt that before with Steve. That desperate urge to cling onto him as tightly as possible like he was her lifeline.

She could see Billy smiling, less with his lips and more with his eyes. He looked blissfully content with relaxed eyes as the weight of Steve’s kiss smothered him and left him utterly breathless.

It was all going great. Perfectly smooth. Nancy sat watching, letting the butterflies in her stomach reproduce and fly around and lift herself up to new heights. Somehow in the midst of everything, she failed to realize that Billy hadn’t been the only person in the room that was worried someone else might be watching, because she sat there, fighting every urge she had to touch herself.

And boy did she have the urge.

As she watched, Billy looked to be falling more and more into the illusion that he and Steve were the only two people in the room. Steve hadn’t even looked at her once. All of his attention had been locked on Billy from the start. That was supposed to make her jealous. Wasn’t it? The fact that Steve couldn’t even spare her a second glance? The fact that he couldn’t take his eyes off of him?

It did. Actually. It did make her jealous.

The difference was, she liked the way it felt.

And the urge turned into something she could no longer over power.

She decided to be discreet with it, bringing her feet up onto the chair with her and sitting on her heel, rocking back and forth, side to side. It wasn’t anything intense, but it would be enough stimulation to hold her over until she calmed herself down a bit more.

She didn’t have Steve’s lips on hers. She didn’t have his essence all over her to be consumed by. It was going to take her a little bit more work to get comfortable.

Though, it seemed she’d overestimated Billy’s comfortability, because just seconds ago, he seemed so blissfully unaware of Nancy’s presence. He seemed so lost in everything Steve.

But Steve’s hands eventually began to travel. No longer mapping the geography of Billy’s chest through the opening of his practically unbuttoned shirt, his hand slid down, over the fabric. Down. Down. Further, and further…eventually breaking the denim barrier below his belt.

Billy instantly tensed as Steve made contact. Eyes shooting open into a look of shock. His breath seemed to be lost as he allowed his neck to turn, and his gaze to drift back over to Nancy, who, just like him, had frozen in place.

Steve retracted his hand and stood up, recognizing immediately what had caused Billy to startle. Suddenly, they were back to square one, waiting around with too much distance between them.

“Hey,” Steve said softly, and he was slow with his reapproach, leaning back down and making sure Billy knew where his hands were—way up high, right beside his face. Steve gently scooped up the side of Billy’s head and brought him back to facing upwards, and looking back at Steve with a blank and panicked stare. “It’s just me, Billy.”

Steve then placed a long and incredibly soft—by the look of it—kiss to Billy’s lips, as if to pull him back into the trance he’d just been, or to give him a little bit of medicine to help calm his overactive nerves.

It was intimate. It was very intimate. Not just for the kiss itself—Nancy had seen enough of that already to be used to it—but it was in the eyes. Steve looked down at Billy so tenderly. So full of concern and desperate understanding.

And then there was Billy.

Billy who looked like a kicked puppy. Billy who looked like he was borderline on the verge of tears just looking up at her boyfriend. It looked like he was wearing somebody else’s face, because Nancy would have never thought she would see an expression like that out of Billy Hargrove. She never thought she’d see him so nervous and unsure. So out of his depth.

He was still straining to look at her.

“Hey, look at me.” Steve said, his voice barely above a whisper. If it weren’t for the stillness of the room, it would have been easily likely that she wouldn’t have heard a thing, even given how close she was to the conversation that didn’t involve her. “Not at her. At me.”

She could hear his quick and uneven breaths. She could see them with the rise and fall of his chest—so erratic. Steve just kissed him again, bringing a hand to rest right over Billy’s lungs as he did, as if to watch as the seconds passed as Billy’s breathing and heart rate slowed, relaxing into his lips like a sedative.

Steve was slow and calculated with his next moves. He didn’t let his hands travel too far south, and instead stopped at the shirt buttons just above Billy’s navel, undoing them with only one hand—his other hand was still up by Billy’s head, drawing circles with his thumb behind Billy’s ear.

Billy leaned into the touch.

It was soft, slow, and careful. Each movement designed to give Billy the chance to breathe, but not the chance to overthink and freak out again, and Nancy sat there, literally on the edge of her seat watching as the clothes started getting stripped off.

First was Billy’s shirt, buttons undone and laying open, exposing the final bit of his torso those two clasps managed to keep hidden. It wasn’t anything either of them hadn’t seen before, but something about the moment itself made it feel like they were all fully exposed.

Then Steve stood up, momentarily parting their kiss to pull his own shirt over his head with the help of Billy, who was pulling at the hem. She could’ve sworn she saw Billy chasing Steve’s lips, his head practically levitating up off the bed to follow Steve’s movement to savor just the extra split second of contact.

They took the opportunity of their already parted lips to take Billy’s shirt off the rest of the way, tossing both of their discarded garments on the floor behind the bed, as if they were obstacles in the way of the finish line.

Steve was back down within seconds, hands not immediately making a move to take off the rest of Billy’s offending clothing, and instead taking the opportunity to explore the canvas of Billy’s chest. She could tell that it was completely hairless, which was in striking contrast to Steve’s.

She always loved Steve’s chest hair. She loved the way it felt running through her fingers.

And so did Billy, apparently.

She hadn’t been paying too much attention to where Billy’s hands were. Not until they landed right on the same spot of Steve’s chest where hers always landed, stroking up and letting the gaps of his fingers wade through the coarse sea of hair.

And Steve’s hands were traveling the same route they always did on her, on Billy. Up, and over the breast, squeezing the soft tissue. If she was being honest with herself, her and Billy weren’t much different in the realm of chest size, and all things added together, it was like she was staring at herself in a way.

One of Steve’s fingers brushed over Billy’s nipple and Nancy could have sworn she heard him gasp at the sensation. Or maybe that was just her, because she was so intently focused on Steve’s hands that she sat there waiting, expecting to feel something when Steve’s finger grazed him as if she really was the one in Billy’s position.

But she felt nothing, and without even thinking, she snaked her hand under her own shirt, sticking it under the wire of her bra, and fully giving herself into the fantasy playing out before her very eyes.

She no longer had the mind to care whether or not anyone was looking at her.

Things were finally looking like they were progressing. Steve and Billy kissed for a long while, easing into everything at an agonizingly slow pace for Nancy, but at least when Steve finally reached down to work at Billy’s jeans, he didn’t freeze up.

Undoing Billy’s belt with one hand probably wasn’t the most time-sensitive way of doing it—Steve’s fingers kept fumbling as he tried pulling the end through the loops. Steve seemingly refused to move that other hand away from sitting in the center of Billy’s chest. Nancy could only assume Steve was feeling the same sensation Nancy was feeling with her own hand pressed to her chest—that strong and chaotic pumping of blood through her veins.

When Steve finally managed to free Billy of a closed zipper, he didn’t hesitate all the much before slipping that same free hand below the waistband of Billy’s underwear, and it was like there was a sudden jolt of electricity that was felt by all three of them, despite only two of them having had any contact for a circuit completion.

While it was a collective jolt, they all reacted pretty differently.

Nancy’s eyes widened, and she could have sworn she felt the beat of her heart pause completely for a full second.

Billy produced a sound, seemingly against his will and completely uncontrolled. Nancy could only describe it as shockingly delighted. She also assumed Billy was having a whole separate reaction downstairs…judging by Steve’s reaction.

Because Steve smiled, almost deviously, like he had a plan in his mind, and Nancy was sitting on the edge of her seat just waiting to hear it.

Steve dragged his tongue along his upper lip, as if he was staring directly at a dinner platter of all his favorite foods.

Steve brought himself even closer to Billy, chest resting against chest, his weight on top of the other boy, his mouth less than an inch away from the other boy's mouth.

He didn’t kiss him. He just let his hot breath hit Billy’s face as he spoke the words directly into Billy’s agape mouth.

“What do you wanna do?”

Nancy could actually see it that time. Her eyes had drifted down back to where Steve’s hand was still below Billy’s waistband, and she didn’t fail to notice the very subtle movement, and the ever so slight laugh that came from Steve in response.

“Someone’s eager,” he said.

Billy didn’t respond. He just stayed lying there with wide open eyes, mouth hung open in a perfect display of shock.

Steve didn’t acknowledge it—hell, he probably wasn’t even aware of it, so locked in and focused on Billy—but Billy was hardly the only eager person in the room, and it wasn’t like she was being subtle about it. She was biting her lower lip, and grinding against her heel much faster and violently than before. She wasn’t just eager, or excited. She was outright desperate.

More than anything, she was excited for Billy’s answer to Steve’s question. It was the one thing they didn’t discuss beforehand. She didn’t think they had to, seeing as that part was just between him and Billy, and not herself. It didn’t feel like she should have a say in any of that.

She didn’t want to have any say in it, because even if she was asked—just like Billy had been asked—she was almost positive she wouldn’t have been able to come up with an answer. Even sitting there without the question posed to her, she had no idea what she wanted. All she knew, all she wanted in that very moment, was to know what they wanted.

Something about knowing another person’s deepest desires lit something up inside Nancy. It was the type of thing Steve would never normally share with her, or with anyone for that matter. She could only assume the same for Billy. And yet, she was sitting there, right within earshot of an admission she was never meant to hear.

Billy let out a high-pitched whimper as Steve moved his hand against him. It was a sound that clearly made Steve happy, but it wasn’t the sound he—and Nancy—was waiting to come out of his mouth.

Steve dropped his lips back onto Billy’s, and it was less like a kiss, and more like he was trying to suck the answer from his throat. Kissing him into a sweet delusion that the words he was saying were just thoughts inside his head, where only he was privy to hear them.

Billy let out a long exhale through his nose, melting into the kiss. Clearly, whatever little spell Steve was casting was working wonders.

Steve parted too soon, leaving Billy chasing the kiss and meeting nothing but air after lifting his head up from the surface. He was absolutely delirious. High off of Steve’s kiss. It was like truth serum, and all Steve had to do was ask him one more time.

“What do you want to do, Billy?” he asked. “Whatever you want.”

There was barely a second of silence before Billy hummed and said

“Fuck me.”

Steve showed a look of momentary surprise, as if that was the last thing he expected to hear Billy say.

That thing he had said in the car, about it feeling like he was losing his virginity all over again, turns out he really wasn’t all that far off. She knew from the very beginning that Steve didn’t really know what he was doing. She knew this was as new for him as it was for her. But, it hadn't been very obvious that he was in way out of his head until right then, when his eyes had grown wide and he was suddenly at a loss for words.

“Oh—ok…”

It seemed that Billy noticed that too, and the delirium wore off.

“You’ve never fucked a guy before.” It wasn’t even a question. It was more like a realization.

There was so much going through her head. That initial excitement she had when he’d said it—that skip in her heart beat and hitch in her breath—hadn't disappeared by any means, but it was certainly muffled by all the other noise. The concern for Steve, the feeling of being exposed, the worry over the fact that everything had stopped and the desperation for it to continue. But more than all of that, the loudest thing ringing in her ears were all the questions she had about Billy.

He had been subverting all her expectations with every move since the moment he stepped through that front door. Every word out of his mouth was like a brand new piece of information that disproved scientific fact, leaving her to scrap everything and start over from scratch. The words that Billy said, while exciting to her, were the very last ones she expected him to say, or want. Steve seemed to be taking it all in with ease. All up until that point, when he finally felt like he was the fish out of water.

Steve was speechless and still, and his silence would have been palpable if Billy hadn’t taken away any ability he would’ve had to form words by taking hold of the nape of Steve’s neck, and suffocating him with another kiss.

Nancy was taken aback by just how well the two of them seemed to fit, like adjoining pieces of the same puzzle. Steve’s face softened and his eyes relaxed almost instantly when Billy kissed him—just like Billy when he was the one in Steve’s place. They were so easily able to calm each other, make each other feel safe. It was like they could read each other’s minds. Like they knew more than she did.

Nancy would be lying if she said that didn’t strike a nerve. Part of her wished she could be privy to the telepathic conversation taking place between the two, but another part of her wasn’t sure she’d want to know what they weren’t saying out loud, because if they weren’t saying it out loud, maybe it was for good reason.

Nancy thought a little too hard about Billy’s request…or was it a demand? She couldn’t really discern his tone from how low he spoke. She wasn’t very far from them, but the volume in which he had said those words had made it seem like they were a mile away. Those words. God, was it stupid that she never once considered that to be a possibility? She was grateful Billy wasn’t looking at her to see the look on her face, because it wasn't doing all that much to put down the rumor that Nancy Wheeler was a prude. Hell, she was beginning to question it herself because she couldn’t even wrap her mind around the mechanics of it all. Surely it wasn’t the same as what she and Steve did.

Steve. Billy had said it himself, although Steve hadn’t confirmed, she knew the truth. No, of course he hadn’t.

Steve seemed to finally find his bearings, and spoke in stark contrast to the blubbering mess he’d been just moments ago.

“No.” he said, pausing to take what seemed to be a relaxing breath, “You’d be the first.”

There. The confirmation that had Nancy sitting on the edge of her seat. Nancy never thought of Steve being anything mysterious. He seemed to be an open book. But if the past week had taught her anything, it was to stop acting like she knew everything all of the time. But, she couldn’t help but feel a little smug at Steve’s confirmation, because at least there was one thing she’d gotten right.

“But…”

There was always a “but” wasn’t there?

“I’ve done, y’know, that before.”

Without saying another word, Steve pushed himself off of Billy and rolled over to pull something out of his nightstand drawer, leaving both her and Billy speechless with his admission.

So much for Steve being an open book, because in all the conversations they had about Steve’s rendezvous with a good chunk of the girls in his year, somehow anal never came up? Nancy could only sit there and try to think about who. And by the pleased yet shocked look on Billy’s face, she could tell he was wondering the same thing.

Nancy ran through the list of names in her head. Stacy? No way. Lori? Not a chance. Abigail? Well, that name was a surprise to start with as Nancy only ever knew her as the girl who sat in the front pew and carted a bible around along with her textbooks. On the other hand, she wasn’t deaf to the jokes that flew around about girls like Abigail, that “the Jesus freaks are the freakiest in bed”. Perhaps there was actually some truth to that.

Somehow, in her spiral, she’d missed a few steps, and once back in reality she found herself looking at the two boys undressing each other the rest of the way with an alarming amount of haste. She was partly worried, with the way Billy was desperately pulling at Steve’s jeans that he would cause a tear in the denim. Something must’ve been said between the two of them that she hadn’t picked up to warrant it, or perhaps it was just another telepathic exchange she should be grateful she didn’t have to hear.

She wished Steve had thought to take that route with the last thing he said, because that was all she could think about. She continued to run through the list of girls, never quite settling on the most likely candidate. She knew she wasn’t going to be able to stop thinking about it, so rather than wasting her energy on shoving the whole thing down, she twisted it around. Instead of going all detective and trying to suss out the girl, she thought about the boy, about Steve. She thought about what Steve must’ve felt. She thought about what he must’ve looked like, about the sounds he would have made. She wondered if they were anything like the sounds he made when he was with her.

Then, somehow right then, it dawned on her that she wasn’t going to have to continue to wonder.

With that thought, any reservations she had, any worry of being watched or feelings of uncertainty were gone as she let her fingertips breach her waistband.

By the time she’d gathered herself again, her eyes first caught sight of the now larger pile of clothes on the ground, and she didn’t even have to look up to know that the two of them were completely naked. Somehow, when she did look up, the sight did nothing for her. Well, at least, them being naked changed nothing. They were still doing that same little back and forth as before—long desperate kisses and wandering hands—the only difference was there was one less barrier, and less up to the imagination. She’d seen Steve’s naked body a countless number of times before, and as for Billy, there wasn’t anything surprising below the belt. It was exactly as she expected. Nothing for additional intrigue.

It wasn’t too much too fast, which was something she knew she was grateful for. And even though her care over potentially being watched had mostly subsided, it was a lot easier to ease into everything with the two boys in front of her with faces pressed so close that any view they might have had of her would be minimal.

She tried not to think about what she was doing. Everytime she thought too hard about it, it never worked. She’d sink, and her mind would run instead of wander, and the overthinking would get to her right before the cliff's edge, but only ever close enough to see it. Something would stop her before she would ever feel the free fall.

She had to shut off her control when she did it, and let her mind do its own thing. She stared ahead, and looked at what was happening before her—Steve was wielding what she now realized was the bottle of lube he’d pulled from his nightstand drawer, clicking it open, and squeezing what seemed to her like a generous amount onto his outstretched index and middle fingers—and she let her fingers move about, not thinking about where they were going, just blindly chasing the good feeling. Looking for the sweet spot.

Her eyes, having relaxed and nearly shut, darted open as a sudden sound entered her ears. Billy’s voice. Honestly, Nancy wasn’t sure if they hadn’t been talking this whole time, or if her hearing had only just returned.

“You sure you know what you’re doing, pretty boy?” Billy teased.

Surely he did. He said he’d done it before, and she couldn’t imagine it would be that different with Billy being a boy. Billy obviously wasn’t serious with his question. He was clearly meaning to coax something out of Steve. Only Nancy didn’t quite realize that until after he’d coaxed it out of him.

Steve looked cocky, smiling down at Billy with those gel coated fingertips still hovering in the air. “I know the golden rule,” Steve said, and those aforementioned fingers began their downward descent, falling into a place obscured by Billy’s thigh. It didn’t matter that Steve’s hand moved out of her vision, because she could see the chill run through Billy’s body. He inhaled sharply, and exhaled loudly, and Nancy didn’t know exactly what Steve was doing behind Billy’s thighs, but she knew by that reaction that Billy liked it. Steve smiled, proud of himself, and finished what he was saying. “As long as you’re feeling good, then I gotta be doing something right.”

Good God. Nancy knew the words weren’t directed at her but it was too easy to pretend that they were, because right as he said it, her own fingers had found the spot, and it felt more than just good. Steve was definitely doing something right.

Steve had started doing something to Billy. Something more than what he’d already done, because Billy was close to writhing. His neck was flexed as if he was straining to get a good look at Steve’s headboard, and the hand of his that she could see was gripping the fabric on Steve’s bed. For a second, Nancy wondered if he was in pain. Sure, she’d never experienced it for herself, but she could imagine that what Steve was doing, if not done correctly, would hurt. Nancy would have made that assumption based on Billy’s movements alone, but the sounds he was making were telling a different story.

If she wasn’t sure then, that Billy was loving every one of Steve’s moves, she was sure when Steve asked the question.

“How does this feel?” Steve asked, and she could tell by the look in his eye that he already knew the answer, and like her, he just wanted to hear Billy say it.

Billy nodded, almost frantically. “Mmhmm,” was all he managed to get out. It looked like he was preparing to say something else, his mouth open and tongue moving like it was beginning to form a word, when a sharp inhale replaced his voice. Instead of finishing the thought, and saying what he was going to say, he just nodded his head again, somehow even more frantic. Another one of those nonverbal cues, except this time, somehow, Nancy was able to pick up on the meaning too.

More.

“Like that?” Steve asked, again, already knowing the answer. Nancy was beginning to get on the same wavelength, because she knew the answer too. Billy nodded again.

“Feels good.” Billy barely managed to get the words to come out as something coherent. Little did he know that wasn’t necessary, as it seemed they could all read each other’s minds at that moment. “Don’t stop.” he added.

“Good.” Steve said, and Nancy could tell just the praise alone did something to Billy, letting out a small whimper. “You let me know if anything changes.”

Steve was always so attentive. That part wasn’t surprising. But the way it felt being an onlooker was. Not only was watching all the ways Steve was affecting Billy doing a lot for her, but just Steve alone, seeing how he wielded his power and control with a steady hand, how he was so focused on Billy, how he wanted nothing more than to make his partner feel good, first and foremost. It was the kind of thing that got lost in the heat of it all. When Nancy was in Billy’s position, Steve was the same way. Albeit, not as slow and careful as he was with Billy, not treating her as something overly fragile. Still, he was attentive. Always checking in, asking questions just for the sake of asking them, diving into her mind and not taking any advantage while in there. Just exploring, and getting to know the new environment.

While things had been moving very slowly, Steve hadn’t been with Billy for that long in the grand scheme of things. Not as long as he’d been with Nancy. Steve had been given over a year to learn how to read her, and understand her, taking notes each time they had sex on what she liked and didn’t like. He didn’t have that advantage with Billy, so perhaps that was another reason he was taking things slow, aside from the obvious. Thinking back, the first time she and Steve had sex, he was slow with her too. Maybe that should make her feel jealous, that that part wasn’t special. It didn’t.

Her mind was wandering again, and she was losing that feeling. Nancy turned her focus back on the boys. Funnily enough, during all her overthinking about how slow things were progressing, things had started moving way faster than she was expecting.

They were back to kissing, except Steve’s right hand stayed hidden in that space she couldn’t see. Their positions had changed too. Steve had settled himself in between Billy’s spread legs, and Billy hadn’t moved much, but she noticed how his feet had moved further up on the bed, his knees bent at a tighter angle than before. Steve’s other hand was back on Billy’s chest too, and it wasn’t until Nancy noticed that she realized her own hand was still slipped under her bra.

She watched, and matched Steve’s movements, and put herself back into the scene.

For the most part, aside from the satisfaction evident in Steve’s smug smile, Billy was the only one getting any sort of pleasure. At least, that was what Nancy assumed with all of his toe curling and sheet gripping. Steve had seemed too calm and collected to be anywhere near where Billy was at. She wasn’t blind to Billy’s dick. It was hard not to notice with the way it was sticking straight up, almost as if it was begging to be gawked at. She caught Steve glancing down more than once or twice to steal a look, and she didn’t fail to notice the way he bit his lower lip each time. Clearly he was feeling something too, but any visual confirmation like she had with Billy was hidden behind Billy’s fucking thigh. If she wasn’t already busy doing her own thing, she’d have stood up, walked over, and taken a look for herself, like a surgeon over an operating table.

Instead, she just kept looking out for all of Steve’s other visual cues, even going as far as tallying up each and every time Steve’s top teeth dragged against his lower lip.

She had to keep reminding herself to relax, and stop letting her mind wander. She was losing sight of the real task at hand—just enjoying it.

“I think you might be ready.” Steve said, as if Billy was a meal he was preparing.

Billy let out an exhausted groan. “You think?” he said sarcastically, lifting his head as if to gesture in front of him. Billy’s hands were still preoccupied with gripping the sheets. Steve’s fingers must have still been inside of him.

That thought right there sent a wave through her body. She really hadn’t quite grasped exactly what was happening until right then. Knowing was enough to bring the good feeling back, and quickly she was beginning to understand Billy’s urgency.

Steve lifted himself again, and those fingers she’d assumed were just inside of Billy were freed, and she could’ve sworn her heart stopped when she saw it. God, she was being dramatic. She’d seen Steve’s dick countless times, up close and personal, and yet she’d never seen him like that. It was the same, but the person it was attached to…it was an entirely different person. Somehow she hadn’t noticed it before, but Steve was sweating, and shaking. Normally he was so suave, never nervous when it came to sex, and Billy had him shaking.

Wait. Maybe she’d gotten it all wrong. Because the next thing she noticed was that Steve was no longer looking down at Billy.

He was looking over at her.

The illusion had fallen.

He was looking at her going to town on herself and she couldn’t even be bothered to stop. It was too late, he had seen, and somehow him seeing filled her with even more dread than Billy seeing would have.

And Billy. He was still laying there with his eyes looking up at the ceiling, none the wiser about what was happening between her and Steve.

The only thing Nancy could think as to why Steve was that he was upset by what he saw. All that time she’d spent working through her own potential jealousy, never once considering Steve might feel that too when it came down to it. Was he disgusted by her? So many emotions were flooding her head and she felt frozen, which didn’t help her case being stuck with one hand under her shirt and the other in her pants.

She just looked back at him, and tried her damndest to read the expression on her face. She had to have been missing something. She had to.

It felt like she had been staring at him forever, but Billy was still laying there so blissfully unaware that it couldn’t have been that long. She felt like she had to be wrong, because it didn’t make sense. Steve knew it was part of the plan, so he shouldn’t have been surprised.

Then she saw it. Maybe she only saw it because she was desperately looking for it, but in that expression so desperately trying to hide what he needed, she figured it out. Steve was nervous. He wasn’t jealous. Neither were the reason he was looking at her.

He was just like Billy before, looking at her, waiting for her to let him know it was okay.

She’d said it so many times before that she just assumed it didn’t need to be said again.

Then just one second later, she realized he and Billy weren’t the only ones that needed it. She needed it too.

They both needed to know not only was it okay to want it, but it was okay that they were—very obviously—enjoying it.

Nancy gave him a soft and knowing smile, and nodded her head. She glanced down at Billy and saw he still hadn’t noticed the pause in the action, and she took the opportunity to mouth the words—for extra measure—it’s okay.

Steve smiled, and it was as if he read her mind when he silently repeated her words back to her.

It’s okay.

It was all okay.

And finally—fucking hopefully—they’d jumped the last hurdle.

Steve had gathered his composure and resumed what he’d been originally doing when he lifted himself off of Billy—grabbing the condom, which she presumed he also pulled from the nightstand along with the lube, and sliding it on himself. It appeared to take him a few moments to get Nancy to disappear again. Part of her wished she could just make herself invisible, clearly it would have made things a lot easier.

Nancy was shocked that after every hiccup, every uncertainty, they were still going through with it. She felt stupid, really. How had she been so naive to think it would go smoothly. Maybe it was because it was always so easy with Steve, she figured it wouldn’t change much by just adding one more factor.

But then again, Billy was the additional factor, and perhaps it was her own fault that their initial plans went awry.

She took a deep breath, tossed away the thought, and freed her mind the best she could because she earned it, and she had no intention of giving it up. She couldn’t.

Steve kissed Billy again, consuming him like his lips had been coated with a potion to ease all tensions. Maybe they were. She knew the taste of his cigarette had done something to her. She licked her own lips at the thought, and she found herself craving that familiar taste.

Billy’s eyes were closed, not squeezed shut, but relaxed, like he’d spent all the energy he had to keep them open.

Steve gave Billy one last kiss and hovered there, his breath falling into Billy’s face. Nancy noticed the pink in his cheeks from the concentrated flow of hot air. As Steve was heavily breathing, he was also shifting around his lower half, and one of the hands he was using for support reentered that space out of her vision.

Steve’s face was so close to Billy’s that their noses were touching, and Billy had opened his mouth just slightly, as if trying to swallow Steve’s every exhale, and the words that were soon to follow.

“Tell me if I need to stop,” Steve said, and her own heart fluttered at the comment, but she pushed any extra thoughts about it away. “Tell me how it feels.”

Nancy took a deep breath, and held it.

She didn’t release it until Billy had opened his eyes.

It looked like at the same moment she released her breath, Billy started to hold his.

He looked stunned for a second, but it was short enough that neither her nor Steve had the chance to react before Billy eased their worries, when the wide eyes and clenched jaw and tightly sealed lips were followed up by a long, deep, and seemingly unintentional moan. It was breathy, almost like Steve had knocked the wind out of him.

Nancy’s eyes darted back and forth between Billy and Steve’s faces. Billy was still all wide eyed and open mouthed, but more relaxed, like the only facial muscles he had the use of were the ones controlling his eyelids. Steve was all focus, with his trained eyes and tight jaw. At first glance he seemed like he had it all together, but Nancy also noticed the hair sticking to the sweat on his forehead, his own heavy breaths and stifled vocalizations and knew his mask was falling off right along with Billy’s.

Nancy didn’t have a mask on to begin with. She’d put all her chips in on the assumption that she’d be like a fly on the wall, going completely unnoticed so long as she didn’t provoke them. She’d been doing a pretty good job at not paying attention to her own actions and letting whatever wanted to happen, happen. While it felt good—God, it felt good—her masklessness ran the risk of humiliation. She’d been paying so little attention to her own actions that as she sat there, reveling in each and every one of Billy’s moans, she was completely deaf to whether or not she was making those same sounds. The tingling and shockwaves would have absolutely warranted it for where she was at right around then. Every orbit of her two fingers against her clit was enough to at least make her feel a little breathless each time.

Nancy couldn’t pull her eyes away from Steve’s bare hips, wearing Billy’s legs like a belt, ankles locked together and pressing into Steve’s lower back. She found herself glancing from mole to mole, mapping the constellations in her head. She’d never seen them from that angle before, so used to only ever tracing the moles on his back while he was asleep. It was like she was staring at an entirely new night sky, with so many stars yet to be named.

Even in the dim light, it seemed as though Billy glowed bright enough to reveal more than she’d ever been able to see.

Her eyes naturally fell to that one mole on his side that seemed like it was all alone. Bigger than all the others, just begging for her attention. Steve’s hips were moving at a much slower pace than what she was used to, and she was surprised that Billy wasn’t begging him “faster, faster,” like she would have expected—like she had been doing in the back of her mind. Their respective paces were mismatched, which made things slightly more difficult, but Nancy responded in the only way she knew how, and that was to simply follow Steve’s lead.

Edging wasn’t exactly easy without someone else’s manipulation, but Nancy was always up for a challenge.

She just kept focusing on all of the little details. Billy’s legs spread so wide she thought about how she could test just how flexible he really was. The pads of his fingers digging into the soft flesh of Steve’s lower back, creating crevasses and making themselves a home under Steve’s skin. Steve’s lips seemed to have a magnetic pull against them, landing anywhere and everywhere on Billy’s body that they could reach, admiring and relishing in it all as if Billy was something to be prized and worshiped.

Billy whimpered, the sound caught in the back of his throat somehow making its way passed his tightly sealed lips and heard.

Nancy continued to slow down, continued to focus on the little things, trying her best not to be too swayed by the sounds Billy was making. She wanted to match right up with them, perfectly in sync like a pair of world class synchronized swimmers. Billy’s toes curled, so did hers. She faked it, responding with his every move with an identical move until she didn’t have to anymore, and their breaths became perfectly aligned. The illusion became clear.

“Fuck, Steve.” Billy said with all of his breath. It was the first thing either of them had said since the beginning of their whole ordeal. Or, maybe they had said something prior, and Nancy had just been way too deep inside her head to hear any of it as it was said. Billy’s voice sounded nothing like it had before. That deep voice she just knew was fake was completely gone. The pitch was high, nearly unrecognizable and entirely authentic. The sound of his voice drew her attention back to him, and of course out of all the things to catch her eyes first, it was that dumb head of hair.

She never really appreciated how golden it was. Those blonde curls splayed against the mattress, gleaming from what little light poured in from outside Steve’s windows. It was pretty, she thought, and that surprised her. ‘Pretty’ was rarely a term she’d ever associated with a boy. In fact, the only boy she’d ever really thought was pretty was Steve—his deep brown eyes and chestnut brown hair all paired together with that soft smile—Steve was pretty. Billy wasn’t pretty, at least, she didn’t think so before. He was tough, gruff—he looked like he was born to be covered in grease and adorned with leather. Pretty—to Nancy—always meant soft. Billy wasn’t soft. He was hardened, rigid, sharp as a knife.

That was what she thought.

But looking at him underneath Steve—the soft hair, the soft features, the soft skin…god…Billy was so pretty. Blue eyes, golden hair with skin shown so much love from the sun, the curves of his body looking like the never-touched dunes in the desert, making a shape she wanted to trace with her fingers.

Billy whimpered again, and her entire body felt it.

God, she wanted to touch him. She wanted to be closer.

She felt so far away, despite being just barely out of arm's reach. The distance seemed to only grow right along with her desire to become part of it all, fully, in every way.

Billy moaned again, and so did Steve, simultaneously, like Steve was the melody and Billy was the harmony. They made a beautiful song together. Nancy wasn’t sure how she felt admitting that, but it was the truth.

Looking up, pulling herself from her thought tornado, she finally started to grasp the situation. She’d been so inside her head, she’d missed so much.

Billy was panting like he was on the brink of passing out, and Steve didn’t look much better. He was fucking Billy. Like, truly, fucking Billy. Nancy could only stare as he thrusted himself in and out at a very quick pace.

That was also the moment she realized that she’d fallen behind.

Those moans and whimpers only grew in frequency, right along with the release of desperate expletives and pleas from both parties taking up space on the bed. They were close. If Nancy didn’t know just by the scene alone, she knew for sure when Billy began to chant it—alerting everyone in the room the he was on the brink.

Nancy wasn’t, not even remotely. She’d been so focused on slowing herself down, she’d been lapped.

“Steve, I’m gonna cum!”

“Me too,” Steve exhaled the words, “cum with me.”

Nobody was waiting for her, and it was clear she had no shot at catching up now. Perhaps last place was just her destiny.

One of Steve’s hands traveled down until it had found itself wrapped around Billy’s cock, red-tipped and leaking pre, visibly aching to be touched. Steve’s other hand stayed put on Billy’s chest, squeezing Billy’s pec like it was his own personal stress reliever, making a point to drag a thumb over an erect nipple, keeping Billy extra stimulated.

Nancy was out of breath just watching. She’d picked up her pace and she felt close, just not close enough. Billy and Steve were miles ahead of her, assisted by their raging teenage boy hormones.

Billy’s lower lips stayed trapped between his teeth, for so long and with so much force Nancy was sure there’d be permanent indentations left after they finally released their hold. Still, even with all that effort, he couldn’t keep the cacophony at bay. Nancy just wished he’d let it out, because the sounds we’re doing just as much to her as the sight of the whole thing was.

Nope. Too late. It was too late.

The next thing she knew, as she sat there shamelessly touching herself, standing on her tallest tiptoes trying to reach the height the two boys in front of her were at, they were coming. She watched as Billy’s cum shot up and coated Steve’s stomach. She couldn’t actually see Steve coming as he was still buried deep inside Billy, but she could see it in his face—the way his jaw went slack and his eyebrows shot up to his hairline. She just kept trying, trying, trying.

Steve rolled over and collapsed on his back, completely spent. Nancy wasn’t sure exactly just how much time had elapsed, but it felt like an eternity and nothing at all at the exact same time. It was certainly not enough time for her as she sat there, the moment ruined, her orgasm hanging in the air just too far out of her reach.

She sat there and she closed her eyes, stretching as much as she could to reach what was so close, yet so far—too far. It was just too far.

Her breath remained unsteady as she sat there, daring to open her eyes again to take a look at the scene in front of her. At least they managed to enjoy themselves. That was what Nancy said she wanted. Right? Make Steve happy. Make him feel good. That was supposed to be enough, she thought.

She opened her eyes, and felt the immediate urge to shut them right back up when they were met with a pair of piercing blue from across the room. Billy was lying on his back, his hands coming to rest of his chest, right on top of Steve’s hand that remained through all of it. Billy was looking right at her. Steve wasn’t. He was on the side of Billy opposite of her, shielded by Billy’s body with his face buried in the pillows. He couldn’t possibly have known of the full conversation happening between her and Billy with just their stares alone.

Billy’s eyes barely moved from where they were locked in on hers, just glancing down for less than a second, looking straight at where her hand still breached the barrier of her waistband…then right back up. She half expected the next look to say it all, fill her with shame—it didn’t.

The look was almost…sad…in a way. She had no idea what she must have looked like from Billy’s point of view, but with a look like that, she could only assume she looked like a pathetic wreck. She assumed that the sad look was pitying.

She wanted to move—fix herself up and make herself more presentable, because she didn’t like how it felt as if there was a spotlight shining directly on her, lighting up all of her deepest insecurities for even the people sitting high up in the nosebleeds to see. None of what was happening was a part of her plan…although, thinking back, she never really got that far. She never considered what would happen in the aftermath.

But was it really the aftermath? In Billy’s eyes, maybe. In Steve’s eyes, definitely. But in her eyes?

Things hadn’t finished for her just yet. The only problem was, she was at a loss as to how she could possibly go about continuing.

Billy still stared at her, which only seemed to further complicate everything going on inside her head. She didn’t like how she couldn’t read his expression. Billy Hargrove was proving to be the one mystery she might need a little help with solving. She’d been going full sleuth all night, only to have been played a fool by Billy’s red herring.

His eyes on her made her skin crawl, and she did everything she could with her own stare to make him look away, or at the very least stop looking at her like that. Time felt frozen with his eyes on her. It felt like an eternity had passed.

She just stared back harder, adorning a look on her face just like El’s when she was moving things with her mind…angry looking—a little—but mostly just focused.

She felt stupid with her face stuck like that. She was just waiting for the pin to drop and the chorus of laughter to commence. That was always how it happened in movies. Somebody would do something embarrassing and not a soul alive wasn’t there to witness, taking only a second before raising their arms to point and laugh. They’d form a circle around her. They’d get closer and closer and she’d feel like the walls were closing in and soon enough she’d find breathing to be the hardest thing to do.

Of course, in actuality, it wasn’t like the movies. Nothing was. Not this time.

Those eyes that once stared at her, so unreadable, vanished, turned away in the opposite direction.

She took a breath, relaxing only a little. Then she realized.

Those eyes were facing Steve.

Suddenly all she wanted was him to look at her again, or at the very least, see what they looked like…despite the fact that they never told her a thing.

She didn’t like any of what was going on. She didn’t like how it felt like she was just waiting for something to happen. She didn’t like how it felt like she had lost all of her control over the situation. She hated that the most, being left to the mercy of other people.

Then, there was whispering, and she hated that even more.

It was what she’d asked for, to be left out of the equation—that pesky little remainder in a division problem.

She thought that was what she wanted.

It was becoming more and more evident by the minute that, even if their equation wasn’t clean, where everything could just be so evenly divided, she wanted to be a part of it—included, like a fraction, rational.

She wanted to know what they were saying.

She wanted to ask. She wanted to use that snark she practiced so well and remind them that whispering was rude when other people were around. She wanted to inject herself into their conversation, and she would have if her lips hadn’t felt like they’d been sealed shut.

It was awful. She felt so weak. She hated feeling weak.

She wanted to scream, but those sealed lips wouldn’t come loose even for that.

The whispering stopped. That was the first thing she noticed. Then, she noticed blue eyes back on her. Then she noticed those blue eyes had company.

Steve was finally looking at her. For a moment, when it was just Billy looking at her, she’d forgotten Steve was even in the room.

Usually she loved it when Steve looked at her. She loved when his eyes would always find hers from across any room, or when they were alone, watching something on TV, and his eyes would drift off the screen just to stare at her. She loved it especially when they were having sex, when he couldn’t take his eyes off of her, his pupils blown wide. Earlier, she had been hoping he’d look over at her. Now, all she wanted was for him to look away.

The eyes on Steve were just like the eyes on Billy. Sure they were deep brown, not a piercing blue. They weren’t that look of love and lust she had been yearning for. They were sad eyes of unnecessary concern and the weakness continued to seep into her.

Then there was a shift, and her gaze was pulled from the trance of Steve’s eyes, down just slightly to the source of the sound—the creaking crumple of moving limbs on a spring mattress.

Billy had rolled over onto his side, his whole naked body turned towards her. It was a vulnerable position, she noted. She thought back to the beginning of the night…god…how long ago was that? For her it felt like it had been forever ago, but really it could’ve only been a matter of maybe twenty minutes…

Twenty minutes or forever ago, Billy had been in her position—put on the spot, nervous, out of the loop, terrified, uncertain…there were more words, all of them running through her head like she’d consumed the whole thesaurus. There Billy was, lying in a bed with her boyfriend, fully naked, still coming down from the effects of the orgasm said boyfriend had given him. There he was with an outstretched hand, branching out towards her.

She remembered looking at him, smiling, and attempting to settle all those nerves he’d built up inside of him with her simple “it’s okay, Billy.”

She could only assume that was what the outstretched arm was. It was Billy—and Steve’s—way of telling her that it was okay.

It shouldn’t have been so simple, but upon her own realization, the tightness in her gut began to dissipate.

It was little, minuscule, but enough nonetheless to at least melt her out of her frozen situation—the hand that had stayed beneath the wire of her bra, clinging to her breast like a lifeline, moved down and out, and slowly met Billy’s still outstretched hand.

It felt so weird, especially with her other hand still where it was. She wanted to move it for dignity’s sake, but at the same time…she wanted to finish. Usually, she was okay with going without, but not now. Not this time. This time was different. It was her idea. She’d been thinking about it everyday for a week. She deserved her own happy ending just as much as they did.

She just kept looking back at them, trying to make them feel just as vulnerable as she did so that they were all finally on a level playing field.

Nancy hadn’t realized until her hand had finally made contact with Billy’s, their fingertips grazing past one another until they were both holding on, and she’d felt a pull…she may have misinterpreted the meaning of the outstretched hand.

Billy hadn’t yanked her by any means, but the pull was still strong. Strong enough that, given how she was caught so off guard, she was easily carried out of her chair. She had no way to fight against what she hadn’t expected in the first place. She quickly went from a seated position to standing, the heel she’d been riding falling to the floor with an ungraceful thump to the floor. Everything had, somehow, become ten times more awkward than it had the whole night…and obviously, that was saying something.

The night hadn’t seemed to really follow the rules of time. It was forever and twenty minutes, alternating between moments of fast and slow. Always too fast, and too slow.

This was the first time in the night that the timing seemed just right. Because everything started moving really fast.

Billy had sat up and moved his body to the edge of the bed, leaving an open space next to a rather confused Steve.

He’s leaving?

That was Nancy’s first thought. She could hardly admit it to herself, but there was no denying the feeling. Every ache in her gut told her she did not want that.

Though, she still hadn’t found her voice yet to say anything about it.

Billy was still holding her hand, and guiding her. She liked this. Normally she liked being the one in control—the one with the game plan—but in this instance, she was happy to follow someone else’s lead. She’d had enough of a spotlight.

Billy had guided her exactly where she expected, right into that open spot next to Steve, who just looked at her with a smile. By this point, Billy had finally let go, and she’d finally pulled her hand out from her waistband, making both hands free to do exactly what she’d been dying to do…touch.

She brought her hand up to cup Steve’s face, and she couldn’t hold herself back from kissing him. She had to. She thought she might die if she didn’t. She could also tell he was a bit shaky, part of it likely due to his own come down—she’d never seen him cum like that before…she knew, logically, that should’ve made her feel a type of way. It didn’t.

The other reason for the shakiness, well, that was just the even playing field at work.

The kiss was short, just enough for a taste and the gift of some much needed confidence. They parted, and she was surprised to find that Billy had made no attempt to make his escape. He just stood there looking at them with his knees pressing against the edge of the bed.

She half expected time to slow, just like it had in all her moments of uncertainty, but the speed continued to progress.

Billy bent over, wrapping his hands around Nancy’s ankles as he crawled back onto the bed.

Okay. So. He definitely wasn’t leaving.

Nancy looked to Steve, hoping he’d have an answer to at least one of the million questions flying through his head. He seemed to be able to read her mind. Unfortunately for her, she was only met with the shake of a head. So he couldn’t even answer one. Great.

Billy’s hands began to move north. Up. Up. They were at her knees.

Too fast.

She went to speak, but none of the words she had on her tongue would come out. All she could do to tell him to slow down was to tense, and pull her knees up.

“Sorry.” Billy said, and again, she realized, they’d been silent that whole time. Billy was the only one with the courage to speak.

Nancy took a deep breath, reminding her of everything she had witnessed up until this point. Reminding herself that Billy wasn’t scary, that she had Steve right beside her, that everything was equally scary for all three of them.

“What’s happening?” She managed to get those two words out. No more than that, just enough. She was less focused on the chosen words and more on the tone of voice, making sure she didn’t come off as angry or annoyed or any other emotion other than curiosity, because if what she thought was happening was indeed happening…she really didn’t want to scare him off.

She just wanted to be in the loop.

Billy still looked like he’d been frightened in spite of Nancy’s attempts, but he didn’t pull his hands away. They were still touching her knees. That had to count for something.

Nancy wanted to look over at Steve. She could feel his heavy breathing on her neck. She couldn’t, though. She had to keep her eyes on Billy as she awaited an answer.

Which was the best decision, because she was able to watch the lines on his face change with a release of tension as the fright formed into a new emotion. She got to watch as he put on a shy smile—shy…huh, she was still getting used to that.

“I just figured…” he began. His words were slow and obviously carefully chosen. “It’s not fair that only Steve and I have all the fun.”

Nancy felt her breath stop, the sharp inhale lodged in the back of her throat. Her whole body felt like it had gone numb, all except for her stomach, where she could feel the butterflies coming to life again.

“I thought—” the two words came out of her mouth in haste, the thoughts in her head being forced into words on her lips, no idea of the ones that would follow. Fortunately for her, the thought that had come out was an incomplete one, giving her ample time to clamp her lips closed and finish her thought before sharing it with the rest of the world.

She thought…she thought…Fuck! She didn’t even know what she thought, or, at least, her brain was suddenly at a loss for the word…or…well…the appropriate word.

In the narrative she created in her head, Billy only had eyes for Steve—for the boy, not the girl. In the story she wrote, Billy’s womanizer reputation was merely a facade, or a cover. It wasn’t truth. She’d been picking up evidence all night that seemed to prove every suspicion, theory, and story she came up with about that one piece. All until the moment Billy laid his hands on her. She thought…

“I thought,” she repeated, the words leaving her again without warning, “you were…?”

She trailed off, the unsaid word left hanging in the hair. She’d found the word she’d been looking for, but she couldn’t say it. It wasn’t the kind of word you said out loud in Indiana.

Billy seemed to understand that fact too, probably a lot more intimately than she did, judging by the look on his face. He looked relieved that she hadn’t said it. Then he sighed. “I am,” he said simply.

She had to double back, make sure he was answering the question she thought she had asked him. It just made her even more confused. “But?” Again with the incomplete sentences.

Billy was quick to respond. “It’s not like it’s a hardship, Nancy,” he said. “You wouldn’t be the first girl, and I’m sure you’ve heard the reviews.”

She had. Of course she had. She could always hear the girls whispering and giggling at the back of the class, going on and on about how Billy would go down on them. Initially, the first time she heard it, it made her want to gag.

Billy hadn’t existed in her pool of interest. Not until Steve had dragged him in against her will just to leave her sitting there with Billy at her knees, with the proposition at her feet, thinking about all those things she once heard those girls say and no longer feeling the need to gag.

“Are you sure?” It was all she could think to ask, because she feared saying anything more might scare him off. It was his fault she was thinking about the rumors. It was his fault she was curious to see for herself how true they were, even if curiosity had struck before. She pushed away that little part of herself that wanted to pry into Billy’s whole ordeal, and dissect the slight frown that disappeared quickly. She could worry about that later.

She just shook it off, and focused her attention back on Billy, staring him down like she was drilling holes with her eyes.

“I offered,” he said simply, “if it’s fine by you two, it’s fine by me.”

You two. Right. There were three of them there.

Steve was still at her side. She’d forgotten he was even there. Everything had just felt so intimate between her and Billy in that moment. She looked over at him, her neck feeling a little stiff, and she wondered if it actually felt that way, or if her brain was just tricking her to keep her from looking away from Billy.

Billy who was promising her Heaven, or something close to it.

Still, she strained against her muscles to look over at Steve, because of course he was the one standing in her way.

It was only fair, she thought. She was simply reiterating Billy’s initial point, but it remained true in her mind.

But, they hadn’t discussed anywhere beyond what Steve was allowed to do with Billy. They never ventured into the territory of herself taking part in the activity. Was it really fair to assume Steve would be okay with it? It was her idea after all, not his.

She looked at him, expecting an answer to come eventually, all the while mulling over everything and trying to reach a conclusion of what she might do if Steve were to decide he wasn’t okay with it.

Steve wasn’t looking at Billy when he next spoke. He looked at her, and every instinct was telling her to turn away, terrified of the look on Steve’s face when he would inevitably say no. She tried to look away, but she was frozen, forced to witness it all crumble before her eyes.

Except, everything remained intact. The foundation stayed strong enough to hold them.

It appeared Steve had been just as limited for words as she was, saying “yes” and “it’s okay with me” and anything else she and Billy may have needed to confirm consent with a simple nod of his head, and little reluctance behind his eyes.

And the reason behind that minimal reluctance was made clear by the few words he managed to ask Billy.

“What do I…?” Steve couldn’t finish his sentences either, apparently. What do I do during all of this? That was the question he was trying to ask. It was a good question, and she’d learned early on that Steve preferred to have a game plan.

Billy smiled at that, and it was in that moment that Billy finally took his hands off of her knees. The weight being lifted off of her made it feel as though her legs were levitating off of the bed.

Billy was crawling forward, except not towards her, but towards Steve. It only took him half of a foot in length to reach him, but once he did, he didn’t even take a breath before kissing Steve.

It was different that time. It wasn’t filled with heat and lust. It was closer to the kind of kiss someone might give to their significant other in the morning. Soft and chaste. It was like the kisses Steve gave her behind the privacy of an open locker door while the bell was still ringing.

Though, from the outside perspective looking in, the feeling it gave her was nowhere near the same. The blood quickly rushed to her cheeks and the butterflies that had seemed to have gone dormant in her bout of anxiety sprang back to life, fluttering around inside her stomach, and down. Tingling.

She watched Steve sink and melt and it was as if all of his worries had been swept away with the single, soft touch of Billy’s lips. It was incredible, really. You never really get the time to think too much about how a kiss makes you feel, so caught up in the moment, the memory of it only tangible during contact. She could see it now, though, and she wondered if Steve looked like that when he was kissing her. She could only hope.

The kiss was short, but to her it had felt like time had frozen still and she was just privy to their freeze frame. In reality it was just her own mind failing to keep up with the fastly growing pace of everything, when suddenly they had parted and Billy finally gave an answer to Steve’s unfinished question.

“Just kiss your girlfriend, Steve.” he said, his hand still gracing the side of Steve’s cheek, “I’ll take care of the rest.”

Billy’s voice was both incredibly reassuring and enticing. He backed away from Steve and looked at Nancy again, asking the question with his eyes alone, and earning a nod, no more words were left to be exchanged.

Billy’s hands made their way back to her knees, and she tried to watch as the moments started to unfold, but her vision was cut off by the boy to her left, taking her gently by the chin and doing just as Billy had said.

The weight of her own head had quickly become too heavy for her neck to hold, and she slowly lowered herself down until her head met the pillow, not once parting her and Steve’s connection at the lips. She was truly sinking—melting, just as Steve had been just seconds before. She was feeling every feeling she had witnessed, feeling the drug of Steve’s kiss begin to take effect, washing her cares away, and allowing her to succumb to the moment.

The moment—Billy’s hands running up her inner thighs and up onto her hips, feeling his hands form a ‘V’ at the thumbs, framing her like a photo.

He was slow with her, just like Steve had been with him. Perhaps that was where he learned it from, absorbing it all like a sponge. She was given every chance to stop his next move. She didn’t.

She held her breath as Billy’s fingers grazed the skin below her navel. She had become hyper aware in that moment of just how desperately she needed to be touched. She pulled back from Steve, resting her forehead against his in a moment of weakness. The contact at least gave her back her ability to breathe, the heat of her breath falling right into Steve’s open mouth.

Steve’s hands started to move, no longer pressed into the mattress in an attempt to keep his posture. They were snaking around to the small of her back, below the fabric of her shirt, skin against skin. His hand moved up her back along with the hem of her shirt, slowly rising to expose her whole stomach. The chill of the open air against previously covered skin caused her to shiver.

Steve took that as an opportunity to swallow her hot breath, kissing her while continuing to inch his hand up her back until he finally found what he was looking for—the clasp of her bra. It was something he’d always been so boisterous about—his ability to unclasp a bra with only one hand. To her and every other girl, it wasn’t that much of a talent, but she couldn’t say she minded that he was always so smooth with it.

Though, it was hard for her to focus on any of that when Billy was slowly unbuttoning and unzipping her, revealing her, exposing the one part of her that was just aching to be touched. The barrier slowly—teasingly—being removed just made that area even more desperate for stimulation.

Her focus on one single thing started to wane as both Steve and Billy’s hands started to do different but equal things to her on opposite sides of her body. Steve’s hands slithered to her front, stopping to rest just below the now loose underwire. She knew her chest was rising visibly, and she knew that Steve could feel it. Maybe that was why he let his hand sit there unmoving.

Though, there was no way Steve could’ve been sure that he was the one responsible for her heavy breathing, because Nancy wasn’t even too sure herself, not with Billy below her waist with a rogue finger sliding below the line of her underwear, not quite touching her yet, but definitely too close for comfort.

Just the thought alone of how close caused something inside of her to escape. Something that she knew would have been better kept hidden, at least for her own pride’s sake. The sound escaped past her lips, and despite them being smothered by Steve’s, there was no doubt the sound was heard.

She could barely hear a thing, it was like her ears were clogged shut, cause the laugh that escaped Billy’s mouth was muffled. But, she didn’t have to hear him laugh to know that he had heard her, because that rogue finger sliding around started to move closer…and closer…and…

Stars.

She squeezed her eyes shut so tight that she really was seeing stars, and just as she was beginning to feel a little less like she was falling from the sky, Steve had to keep on moving that damn hand of his, up…and up…and up…

“Mmm-Fuck.”

If she hadn’t lost all sensation in her arms, she would’ve slapped a hand right over her mouth. She just kept her eyes shut, because even if logically she knew neither of them were laughing at her, she simply couldn’t bear to look.

She just closed her eyes, kept them closed, and reminded herself of everything that preceded her lying on that bed with not one, but two other men…boys?? Whatever. She kept letting herself forget that little mantra—pretend like nobody’s watching. She just wished they would tell her…though, she guessed she shouldn’t complain considering the feeling she was trying to hide, that good—amazing—feeling…well, she was just going to have to let them continue to work their magic.

Even with her eyes sealed shut, she could see every move they made like a movie playing on the inside of her eyelids. Every physical sensation was so visual. The cool air meeting her once covered hips following the friction of denim dragging against sweaty skin, the weight of Steve’s hand over her breast, his palm warm, and his tongue licking into her mouth, slow and savoring—she could see it all. It was like it wasn’t her. It was like she was watching someone else be stripped down and felt up.

Though, the only thing she cared about was the fact that it was working. She was relaxed, and it felt good.

Really good.

Before she knew it, her jeans were being pulled over her ankles, and she couldn’t even care about how exposed she was, wearing nothing but a hiked up shirt and lacey panties. All she could care about was how close she was from going from feeling really good to insanely good.

Finally regaining strength in her arms, she reached up and pulled Steve in closer, deepening the kiss. She wasn’t afraid when he was close. She was starting to realize she had nothing to fear about Billy either. In some weird and twisted way, his presence was a comfort too.

It was very possible it was only the lust talking, but she didn’t have the time or the care to dissect any of that.

Her near-limp body rolled as Billy inched his way back up the bed, his weight creating dips in the mattress that she fell into. Billy’s breath was hot against her stomach, and she knew what that meant. Not just that Billy’s face was there—the temperature giving her something very vivid to cast in the blank space created from her still closed eyes—but…his face was there. It was close. Everything she wanted was right there.

All she could hear were the echoes of past gossip about Billy Hargrove that she never managed to tune out, no matter how hard she tried.

“So…is Billy a good kisser?”

The group of girls in the back of the lunchroom sat huddled, as if that had given them any semblance of privacy. The reality was that their giggles could be heard throughout the whole cafeteria. Nancy walked by the group with her lunch tray, annoyed by their loud whispering.

She couldn’t understand how Hargrove had gotten all the other girls to swoon over him, and she was tired of hearing about it. He’d barely been in town for a week.

Though, she couldn’t help herself but listen in. She didn’t want to hear about Billy’s sexcapades with the entire Hawkins High female population, necessarily. But at the same time, she liked to have all the info, and for some reason she needed to add whether or not Billy Hargrove was a good kisser into his file she had stored in her brain.

Out of the corner of her eye Nancy could see that the girl who had been posed the question was blushing red and laughing nervously. She had her head bowed slightly and didn’t meet eyes with any of her friends sharing a table with her.

“You could say that.” she said.

Nancy nearly stopped dead in her tracks. The tone of that girl's voice said a lot more than what she was telling anyone with her words. If that hadn’t been obvious enough, the gasp let out by another girl at the table sealed the deal.

“Are you saying???!!”

“He DIDN’T!!”

“OH MY GOD!!”

Fortunately for Nancy she’d reached her table by that point, so nobody had to witness what would’ve happened had she not had a steady surface to rest against has her knees buckled.

She was pulled out of her thoughts from the sensation of her body growing colder, caused by more absent clothing. She felt the cool air hit her chest first, as Steve began lifting her shirt up until the bottom hem had reached her neck. It was then that they parted once more, but only for as long as it took to get her shirt over her head and take her bra the rest of the way off.

She had been so preoccupied with that, and working through the straight jacket her tight fitting top had created for her, that she only noticed the breeze on her lower half when her panties were already halfway down to her knees.

The only way she could describe the situation was that it felt heavy. Like she had been pinned by a barbell loaded with too much weight.

Then Steve put his lips back on her and she felt just a little bit lighter, her back arching a little bit more on the bed, and it quickly started to make some sense. Though, it wasn’t something she could quite put into words.

Steve sucked the weight from her. That was the best she could do. She watched as her vision fully faded despite her eyes being wide open. Aside from that, every sensation was heightened tenfold. She could feel the hairs on her arms stand up like evergreens, she could hear the quietest sound from Steve’s swallow to Billy’s lips smacking.

She could feel Billy’s every exhale brush her skin. His nose wasn’t touching her, but it might as well have been because she swore she could feel it.

Which meant she was not at all prepared for what it would be like to actually feel it.

It was the build up, the anticipation, the vivid thought and imagination about what it would be like. It was something she never really allowed herself to want or crave and it was in her hands.

For a while, it all seemed to wrong. It seemed wrong to want something like that. It seemed wrong to want something like that while simultaneously having a boyfriend. Every step they had taken since Steve admitted to her what he and Billy had done in the boys bathroom at school had felt like a step in the wrong direction. It wasn’t the way it was supposed to go. Everyone would say that.

But Nancy knew. She knew this was right.

She was ready to narrate the whole thing like the moon landing, countdown and dramatic effect, but before she could even start counting…

Touchdown.

The first thing she felt was nothing at all, but everything at the same time. It was so intense that it was like her nerves shut down for a few moments, like someone going into shock. The world seemed to slow to a stop. Steve’s lips on her neck felt like they were barely moving, and Billy…

Before she could even process what was going on in that region, the world picked up the pace, and everything was back to regular speed…which, after spending an eternity in slow-motion, felt entirely too fast.

She could gather two things about what Billy was doing to her. The specific actions were lost, but what she did know was that A. it felt amazing, and B. he clearly knew what he was doing. What started out as intense pressure grew into something more, leading her to fall even deeper into the absolute mess she was before. Her toes curled so tight they started to cramp. Her hands gripping tightly where they’d found themselves buried into Steve’s hair like she was holding on for dear life.

Steve didn’t react much at all to his own hair being ripped from his scalp, making no effort to move himself away from where he laid with his face buried in the crook of her neck.

She wondered if he really knew what Billy was doing to her two feet away from him. His lips hadn’t once left their place against her skin, not enough for his eyes to catch a glimpse of what she could only imagine to be an intensely pornographic display. Nothing but Billy’s stray blonde curls peeking out between her spread legs. Framing him perfectly. Like an art piece. She’d be staring if she could only lift her head up.

How could Steve not want to look?

Why did she want him to?

Maybe it was just her dying to live vicariously through him. Maybe it was because at least she could see the look on his face. Maybe it was because at least someone would get to see.

Holy Hell, she was really letting herself get swept away by the Billy Hargrove effect.

Somehow that was the most embarrassing thing of all.

Nonetheless, despite being overtaken by everything else happening upon the weight of so many thoughts screaming through her head, she mustered up the energy to strip Steve away from her collarbone. Rolling her head towards him and pushing him out of the way. A free hand reaching up and lifting him up just a couple inches towards the sky. Enough to shock him into taking his first deep breath in what to her had felt like forever.

She finally opened her eyes, and they had been squeezed shut so tightly for so long that it took a little more than a few seconds to adjust and make out Steve’s face. When she finally could, he was still staring down at her. But the look in his eyes wasn’t one of focus. His eyes weren’t stuck on her like glue like the boys in the movies watching the girl of their dreams walk past them, unable to look away. His eyes were focused, like he was straining to keep them turned her way. It wasn’t like the rest of the world had disappeared, like Billy wasn’t there. She could see that he knew, that he felt like he couldn’t allow himself to look.

She knew because she knew the feeling. Afraid to look. Afraid to let herself have that. Afraid of what people might think if they knew.

Fuck that.

With those same two fingers that still grazed Steve’s chin, she gave him the push that she had given herself. The shove over the cliff, trusting the water to break your fall. Trusting that everything would be fine in the end, and you’d be glad that you did it.

He didn’t fight the nudge, like he was waiting for her to give him that. Permission. She had already given him that, but she recognized that the doubt wasn’t just going to go away with a magic word.

It was wrong. That was how they had all been raised. They weren’t supposed to want this, and if they found themselves with the temptation, they were supposed to push it down. Out of sight. Never indulge.

If she could find the words, she’d remind him that they were well past that.

But the nudge was enough. She was no longer the focus of Steve’s attention. Billy was. She felt him against her hip. He was hard…again. It was impossible to miss with Steve instinctively using the side of her body for friction.

And Nancy had the perfect view as Steve’s pupils were blown wide. The perfect view of his mouth dropping open, drool pooling at his lower lip, the breath being sucked out of him, along with the word that seemed to be on everybody’s tongue.

“Fuck.”

That did it. That had done it. It was like her lungs suddenly stopped taking in air and the floaty, out-of-body fantasyland she was just living in disappeared at the seams.

It was back to high-speed, feeling every sensation, everywhere, so overwhelming, so right. She was watching it all unfold right inside Steve’s eyes. For a second she could actually see a birds eye view of the whole scene. She could see everything Steve was seeing. She could see Billy buried between her thighs, refusing to come up for air—she’d overheard somewhere that he was a swimmer, figures—using every trick in the book, everything he had at his disposal. It was everything. God it was everything.

It was happening. She knew that and Steve must’ve noticed something too seeing as how the hand of his that had still been on her breast had flinched, like he was trying to reach for something else…someone else.

Nancy stopped him in his tracks, though. Slamming her hand right on top of his because it was happening. She looked at him desperately, her chest rising up and down erratically. Steve glanced her way for just a second long enough to see, looking away from Billy, which she could only assume felt impossible, judging by the look of absolute desire written all over his face.

Then he did even more of the impossible. He took one last glance over at Billy, his breathing stopping completely, biting his lips, his eyes glossed over because he didn’t dare blink. He was savoring the moment, she figured out, because the next thing she knew Steve was no longer looking at Billy, nor was he looking at her. The world went dark as Steve’s frame eclipsed her view completely, sinking down into her lips. His hands remained where she kept them, starting to move once more, no longer stunned frozen by southern beauty.

And Billy, she hadn’t forgotten about him. No amount of mind wandering and Steve existing was taking her attention away from down below. Her toes were curling more than what she believed to be physically possible. The hand still on top of Steve’s was gripping him like a life preserver, sure enough to leave a bruise or two. Both of them with their mouths on her…it was entirely and blissfully suffocating.

She was fully engulfed, she couldn’t get any breath in or out and yet there was still enough open space for the noises to escape past her lips. A whimper followed by a moan that caused Steve to let up just enough to crack a smile. Billy didn’t let it affect him though, he didn’t stop, he kept going, taking everything with him to the finish line.

It was right there. She could taste it.

Right…

There.

All at once her heels slid down the mattress until her legs were perfectly straight and her toes were pointed like a ballerina, her grip on Steve tensed even harder, so hard she was sure she heard him whimper out in pain, her back arched so high that she wasn’t so sure she wasn’t being pulled to the ceiling by some invisible string.

All of that happened as quick as it disappeared, her legs went numb, her hand went limp, she sunk back down into the mattress and it felt like she was falling, as if the mattress was no longer there to stop her descent.

The world had gone dark. Like everything stopped existing. Something hot rushed up her body and pooled in her ears. When the heat went away, she started to shake like she was cold.

Slowly, one by one she regained each of her senses. The first to return was sound, but all she could hear was heavy breathing. She couldn’t distinguish which breath belonged to who, but she was able to determine all three of them were contributing.

Soon her sight followed, the room fading into picture, the dark room suddenly feeling so very bright. All she could see was the ceiling—Steve’s lips were no longer on her. That was when the numbness turned to tingling, and the tingling turned to feeling.

The first thing she felt was Steve’s hand still on her chest, with her hand still on top of it, still holding him in place. Quickly she realized that Steve’s hand was the only thing touching her. Steve’s hand was the only thing in direct contact with her aside from the bed underneath her. Still she knew Steve was still there, even though she couldn’t move enough to turn her head to look at him. She knew Billy hadn’t moved either. He wasn’t touching her, but she could feel his warm breath against her right thigh. She pictured him laying there, his energy spent, still just trying to catch his breath right along with the rest of them.

She felt something else on her thigh. Her other thigh. On the outside. A breeze swept through the room, the air hitting that specific spot quite differently from the rest of her body where sweat was cooling all over.

Context clues gave it away. She was sure she wasn’t the only one to finish. Steve’s heavy breathing and attempts at staying outside her view was enough to figure that out.

He was embarrassed, which was exhausting to realize. She figured they’d already jumped over all of the hurdles earlier.

Still, she had sympathy for him, and she knew better not to say anything about it. That part was for them. Just them. It could wait.

Instead, she finally forced her body to find the ability to move, and with that she also regained her ability to speak.

“Come here,” she said, turning her head, no longer allowing Steve to hide. With the hand that still held Steve’s she interlaced their fingers and initiated a tug. “Kiss me.”

Steve was slow, but not hesitant. The kiss was soft, gentle, and mostly cheste save for the slightest bit of tongue sneaking through before he pulled away. It reminded her a lot of his and Billy’s first—well…the first one that she had seen anyway.

Soon following there was a creak in the mattress by her legs. She lifted her head to see Billy standing to his feet.

She hadn’t forgotten he was there. Though, he had been so quiet for a moment there that she could see how someone else might have.

Billy paused, looking down at her and Steve, having naturally fallen into each other, almost entangled. It was like he was waiting for something to happen.

Before Nancy could even begin to try and piece together what could’ve been going through Billy’s head, the pause was over, and what followed was unexpected, but in hindsight really shouldn’t have been.

He started gathering up his clothes from the floor, quickly, like he was in a hurry. He wasn’t looking at them anymore, like they ceased from existence. But Billy’s demeanor—hiding his naked body with each stray article of clothing—said the opposite.

Steve seemed to have been paying just as much attention to Billy as she had, or even more. He sat up almost completely, letting go of Nancy’s hand in the process, leaving her completely untouched this time.

Billy didn’t notice, or at least he didn’t show it. He just kept moving, sliding into his boxers with his back facing them. When he started slipping one leg into his jeans, Steve lurched forward.

“Are you leaving?” He asked, and Nancy could only describe his voice as disappointment.

Billy stopped at that, and chanced a look back at that, turning only his head and keeping his back turned to them. Nancy had finally figured out how to read the unreadable. He was confused, and dare she assume, sad.

“I figured you two would want your privacy,” he said it so bluntly, and that all but confirmed what she was thinking.

What followed was another lull. Nobody could move. Nobody seemed to know what the right move was supposed to be.

Until Billy had decided the right move was to keep getting himself dressed, which she recognized to be the wrong move when Steve lurched forward, grabbing Billy by the wrist and stopping him, right then and there.

She expected Steve to say something, but the room remained silent. Another pause. Another goddamn suffocating pause.

Before she had time to process anything, Steve turned around, not letting up his grip on Billy’s wrist, and looked at her.

He didn’t say it. He couldn’t. She knew what he was asking. He didn’t have to. The look in his eyes told her more than enough. She could see the desperation, the longing, the embarrassment, the pleading, the need.

She didn’t have to say it either. She just smiled back at him.

Steve quickly turned back to Billy.

“You don’t have to leave,” Steve said.

Billy attempted to pull away from him, but not hard enough. Nancy knew he could if he wanted to. It didn’t take a genius to tell that Billy was just as strong if not stronger than Steve. He wasn’t putting up much of a fight. Billy wanted to stay. Everyone knew it.

Steve pulled against his wrist, not hard, but quick enough that it caught Billy off guard, enough to cause him to stumble. Enough for him to nearly fall into Steve’s lap.

He didn’t try moving away after that.

Steve cautiously brought his free hand up to Billy’s cheek, gliding the knuckle of his index down to his chin. There was no pulling, Billy just seemed to know to follow the direction of Steve’s finger. Down, closer, closer…

They didn’t kiss, but they were certainly as close as possible to each other as they could have been. It was like they were waiting for gravity to do the rest.

“Stay,” she heard Steve whisper, and it caused a chill to run down her spine, and she wasn’t even the one he was saying it to.

Gravity seemed to finally take over, because next thing she knew Billy was sinking. She decided to look away that time. She decided that this one was allowed to be just for them.

“Stay.” She heard him say it again, and at that she looked back at them.

Billy was looking at her when she did.

He looked at her just like Steve, except unlike Steve, he was scared shitless.

She knew words wouldn’t be enough, and she wasn’t going to kiss him into submission like Steve was able to do. That wouldn’t work.

All she did was move over, closer to the end of her side of the bed, opening up enough space for two more bodies to lay down comfortably. That said all it needed to.

She was right.

Steve crawled back into the bed, settling down right in the middle, and much to everyone’s satisfaction, Billy followed him, kicking his jeans back off on the way down.

It took a minute for them all to get comfortable, each of them maneuvering their way underneath the covers, finding themselves each a position that was the most comfortable.

Nancy had grown cold, the covers only doing so much. She snuggled into Steve for warmth. He was lying on his back, but his head was facing the other way.

He was facing Billy, and she tried her best to be discreet as she peeked her head over Steve to see the two of them. Billy had his head on Steve’s chest, just the way she always did. Steve had his fingers running through Billy’s hair. It was always the other way around. It was always her.

She wasn’t used to that.

But she was starting to learn that she might have to get used to that.

Through all of it, Nancy somehow never once entertained the possibility that Steve’s feelings for Billy—and Billy’s feelings for Steve—went beyond something more than just sexual. It was becoming painstakingly clear that it was much, much more than either of them were letting on.

But, what was even worse was that she just might be okay with that too.

#harringrove #billy hargrove #steve harrington #nancy wheeler #stranger things #steve/billy/nancy #trigonometry #mandi writes tresh #fic #stancy #yes I’m alive #yes the long forever awaited final chapter is here #AND IT IS 19K! #WHAT