#hemmed in hollow

[thebeetleball]

it's super late here but uuuuuuh happy lesbian visibility week :▪︎}

#this isn't g/rimmnet ijsut like t hem both.......sososo much #diseases diseases #🐝.png #hollow knight #grimm hk #hornet hk #flag recolor

[kimludcom]

SPECIFICATIONSWaistline: Natural FactorsType: RegularStyle: Sexy & ClubSleeve Style: RegularSleeve Length(cm): FullSilhouette: SheathSeason: Spring/SummerProfile Type: XPattern Type: SolidOrigin: Mainland ChinaNeckline: TurtleneckMaterial: PolyesterGender: WOMENFit Type: Slim FitFabric Type: PolyesterElasticity: Sl

#kimludcom #party dress #maxi dress #Hollow Fitting High Collar Long Sleeve Irregular Hem High Slit Maxi Dress

[fentonphoto]

Hemmed in hollow falls is a beautiful waterfall along the Buffalo National River in Arkansas.

#Hemmed In Hollow Falls #original photography #cannon camera #photographer on tumblr #nature #landscape #pws photos worth seeing #water #rocks #waterfall #chasing waterfalls

[comma57]

#hem hem *splutters and coughs and explodes like a bug from hollows knight* #dmc #id in alt text

[charlesfairies]

Rainy loves to visit the SEWING fairies Hem and Abdul

#fairies art #beautiful fairies #cute fairies #lovely fairies #fairies #hem fairy #rainy fairy #raindrop fairy #abdul fairy #pixie hollow art #pixie hollow

[lovebugism]

shy!reader goes to the pool with Eddie and is too afraid to wear her swimsuit in front of him? Maybe she’s wearing clothes over her bikini/one piece and doesn’t want to undress at first because of her nerves lol

hope u like it! — you still get a little nervous showing your body, but eddie takes it all in stride (shy!fem!r, established relationship, cw for mentions of body insecurity, 1.1k)

Eddie’s rubber flip-flops are much too big on your feet. You fight to keep them on and match his longer strides at the same time. He leads you down the scenic trail of the Harrington vacation home with one hand curled intently around your own. He doesn’t seem phased by the dirt clinging to his bare feet.

“Think Steve’s folks will get mad if we skinny dip?” he jokes over his shoulder, wild curls billowing in the late afternoon wind.

You shrug. “I don’t think they own the lake, so…”

“I wouldn’t put it past them,” he scoffs.

“Me neither,” you concur with a quiet laugh.

A set of wooden steps lead off the trail and towards the shore. They creak under your weight, ancient and half-eroded with time. Eddie stands beside you on the dock, lips curled into a pink, lopsided smile. “Well, what they don’t know won’t hurt ‘em,” he quips before reaching for the hem of his shirt.

You giggle when he lifts the fabric up and over his head. His milky white torso is left on display for you, sprinkled with sparse hair and a couple of faded tattoos. His body is lanky and lean — stomach soft with gentle pudge where his happy trail begins. You couldn’t hide your leering if you wanted to.

“You’re crazy,” you say, still laughing.

“Crazy for you,” the boy croons. 

You watch him reach for the buttons of his jeans, fumbling with them for a moment. Your chest swirls with a strange, hollow feeling. “Wait— Are you serious?” you wonder with wide, glimmering eyes. You’ve never felt totally comfortable swimming in a bathing suit, let alone naked.

Eddie shrugs his freckled shoulders and tugs his jeans down his scruffy thighs. “Yeah. Why not?”

He’s left in his thin, plaid boxers now. He doesn’t seem nearly as fazed by it as you do. Heart thrumming like an anxious hummingbird, your eyes dart over your shoulder and back to him. “What if the others see?!”

“Then let ‘em see,” he chuckles, golden like the early setting sun. “Who cares?”

I care, you almost say, ‘cause you’re too pretty, and I’m not pretty enough. 

You swallow your loathing and instead reply, “Steve would never let you live it down if he caught you out here. You know that.”

Eddie’s bare feet pad against the creaking wooden dock. The sound is mostly drowned out by the waves ebbing and flowing beneath you. Nothing could hide the heavenly sound of his laughter, though. “What? That I’m skinnydipping with the prettiest girl in Indiana?” the boy retorts with a boyish chuckle. “I wouldn’t want him to let me live it down.”

You swallow hard, not swayed by the compliment. Your unsure gaze flits to your feet and the black sandals Eddie lent you on the way down. You see his paler, bare ones come into view just before his calloused palms smooth over your waist — above the oversized t-shirt you wear, which also belongs to the boy in front of you.

“I’m just… I’m just kidding, you know? About the skinnydipping thing,” Eddie assures you, suddenly serious and much quieter with it. His head ducks down to catch your falling gaze. His chocolate eyes sparkle beneath the yellow sun. His lips curl into a lopsided smile. “We don’t have to do it if it makes you uncomfortable. We never have to do anything you don’t want, you know that.”

You purse your lips to the side and think for a moment. You’re not nearly as at ease swimming naked as he is, but you’d be silly to turn down the opportunity to be alone with him. You have spent the entire weekend babysitting, after all.

“Can I keep my bathing suit on?” you wonder sheepishly.

Eddie scoffs. “Of course you can! You can do whatever you want, doll. I’m followin’ your lead here.”

He smacks a kiss to your lips, mouth tasting of nicotine, soda, and strawberries — like nostalgia and springtime.

“Can you turn around?”

Eddie meets your coy look with a wider smile. “Yeah. Sure,” he hums and steps back from you to spin on his heel. You know he’ll see you in your bathing suit before you step foot in the water, but you’ve always felt distinctly smothered by his gaze. You don’t feel half deserving of the adoration always swimming in the deep brown of them.

“It’s nothing I haven’t seen before, you know?” he quips without looking at you.

“It’s different,” you insist, pulling your t-shirt up and over your head. You fold it neatly before setting it gingerly on the dock. You’re left in the pretty one-piece you thrifted before the trip — a floral number that dips low at the chest and ties into a bow at the back.

Eddie doesn’t really understand, but he figures he doesn’t have to. He’ll do whatever makes you most comfortable, no questions asked. “Sure,” he nods. “Can I look now?”

You hesitate for a reason you can’t name. You feel more at ease with Eddie than anyone else in the whole wide world — and besides the fact that he’s seen you in much, much less — you shouldn’t be as nervous as you are now.

“Yeah…” you waver.

Eddie peeks at you over his shoulder for a moment before turning to face you fully. His pink lips purse and a low whistle sounds between them. “Damn,” he mumbles.

You fight back a smile and look away from him, wringing your anxious hands into a knot. “Hush…”

“You’re a total smokeshow, baby.”

“Eddie!”

“Don’t know why you wanna hide from me so bad…” he teases lowly, gravitating towards you without thinking. His hands are warm and wide as they smooth over your sides. His palms curl around your lower back and idle there, fingers lingering just above your ass. “All I wanna do is look at you, and you won’t even let me…” he jokes, mostly serious, but with a playful pout on his lips.

Your arms cross between your bodies. You glare up at him with pretty doe eyes that swim with all the love you have for him. You couldn’t pretend to be annoyed if you tried. “It’s ‘cause you’re so nice…”

His brows raise and disappear behind his fluffy bangs. “You’re shy because I think you’re hot?”

“Yeah,” you nod. “It’s weird.”

“Maybe,” Eddie laughs. He figures it’s on-brand enough for him, as the resident freak and all. But loving you has never felt unnatural or strange. It feels normal, like an instinct he’s always had, something he’s always been destined to do. So he just tilts his pretty head and smiles sweetly down at you. “Can’t help it, though.”

#published by bug #eddie munson x reader #stranger things x reader #eddie munson x y/n #eddie munson x you #eddie munson #stranger things #stranger things imagine #eddie munson imagine #stranger things fanfic #stranger things fic #stranger things fanfiction #eddie munson fanfiction #eddie munson fanfic #eddie munson fic #st drabbles #eddie spaghetti drabble

[notmyneighbor]

Let Me In ~ Doppelgänger Francis Mosses/The Milkman x Female Reader

Chapter 4

Word Count ~ 4.5k

Rating ~ Explicit

CW ~ minor blood and violence, sexual content

Also available on AO3

taglist @luthien-elvenia-asher

Fanart used with permission @kaworinx on Instagram and TikTok

You’ve only barely begun to recover from the wrung out feeling of ultimate bliss when you hear it: the warning klaxon, followed by the sound of tires screeching to a halt. The aggressive roar of truck engines. Doors opening in rapid succession. Loud voices and boots pounding on pavement.

The doppelgänger jerks upright, sliding off the bed and wrenching the curtains to one side to peer down at the scene unfolding on the street below. “They’re here,” he says, and for the first time you detect something like fear wafting from the imposter.

A flood of relief washes over you. Someone had alerted the disposal unit. It wasn’t too late to save lives after all.

You search for your discarded clothing, hurriedly sliding the retrieved garments back into place. Francis’ copy looks at you.

“They’ll know you let me in.”

“Yes,” you agree distractedly, hastily shoving the hem of your blouse back beneath the waist of your skirt.

“They’ll know,” he says again, more firmly this time, moving in front of you, one hand closing around the wrist you’ve yet to refasten the shirt cuff upon. “They’ll know about me.”

You stare at him, realization kicking in. The others were safe. You, however, had no such guarantee. “Are you going to kill me?”

“I should. You’re a liability.” His grip on you abruptly relaxes. He’s merely holding you now. “Your organization will punish you for this.”

You shake your head, trying to hastily tuck your hair back into place. “Not once they hear my explanation.”

The intruder scowls. “What defense will you offer? You knowingly let a replicant into your precious building.”

“I…” Your confidence wavers as you begin to consider how your actions will appear. He’s right. There’s no excuse for what you’ve done. You’ve not only failed at your assigned task, you’ve betrayed your own kind. An unforgivable crime.

He seems to read the slight panic on your features, his voice gentling. “Suppose we make a deal,” he says.

You look at him warily. “What kind of deal?”

“I make it look like you were attacked while you tried to fend me off. Make up some doppelgänger appearance when they ask you. Don’t tell them about Francis’ death. You get to live. I get to go down the fire escape, avoiding extinction.”

A life for a life, in essence. The elevator was temporarily disabled the second the alarm was pushed, but it won’t take the team long to sweep each floor. You were running out of time.

“Okay,” you reluctantly agree.

He turns your arm over so the underside is exposed, thumb pressing firmly just below the hollow of your elbow. “This will hurt,” he cautions. The only warning you get before you see it: that thing inside of the milkman breaking through, emerging. A sickly gray-green digit topped with a sharp yellow claw. He drags it right through the fabric of your shirt, right through your skin. It burns. A blossoming line of red appears, your lifeforce weeping out of the laceration. You feel lightheaded and nauseous.

“Don’t look at it. And don’t let it get on the carpet. We need to leave, now.” He steps back into the milkman’s shoes, not even bothering with the laces. You follow him to the front door, exiting the apartment. Locked again. You hear voices echoing in the stairwell, the heavy tred of the suited disposal unit pounding on the steps.

“Remember what I said.” The imitation’s knuckles graze your cheek, the touch almost tender. The injured arm cradled against your chest is throbbing. “I’m going to knock you out. It will help further disguise what happened.” The voices are getting louder. They’ve finished on the second floor, making their way to the third. The doppel’s fingers curl around the back of your neck, his mouth brushing yours hurriedly before your head is slammed against the wall, sending you hurtling into a void of darkness.

***

There is a debriefing after the incident.

No casualties. The residents were safe, excluding Francis, of course. You have a lie ready to account for his sudden absence. You say you’d heard him mention something about an emergency visit to a sick relative in a neighboring city as he’d dashed out the front door earlier that day. A phone call to his employer wouldn’t match this story, of course. You weren’t sure what family the man even had. None that would corroborate your fabrication, certainly. You were just hoping that your claim about him needing to leave abruptly very early in the morning without contacting anyone was convincing enough. It’s all you can think of on the spur of the moment.

The director, a severe looking middle aged man, frowns over the lenses of his glasses at you. You keep your hands folded tightly in your lap. Your stitched wound is slowly healing, the ache now a sort of dull throbbing that you’re consciously aware of from time to time. No apparent signs of infection, the surrounding skin clear.

“Your track record, up until now, has been impeccable.” The older man’s voice brings you out of your reverie.

“Yes, sir.” It’s true. For six months you’d performed your role as doorman perfectly. Never failing to detect a single doppelgänger. Protecting the innocent.

“Still, this is not a transgression that can simply be overlooked. The consequences of your misjudgment could have been dire.”

You’d stated that you’d realized the person requesting entrance was really a copy only after the door had been opened, catching an error on the paperwork at the last minute. Intervening, attempting to stall the intruder. Injured and knocked unconscious. You knew nothing more after that.

“It’s suspicious that none of this alleged false documentation has been retrieved at the site. Strange also that you’d been carried all the way to the third floor. We also have no record even remotely matching the description of the doppel you’ve given. How do you account for these discrepancies?”

“The replicant stated they were a new resident moving in to the vacant apartment on the third floor. It seemed plausible that there hadn’t been a chance for them to be featured on the day’s list yet. It’s hardly the first time someone’s name hasn’t been placed as it should be. The subtly incorrect DDD logo was the tip off I unfortunately picked up on too late, sir.” You pause, clearing your throat. There is virtually no moisture left in your mouth and you find it suddenly parchment dry. It’s difficult to speak, your nerves betraying you. “The replicant must have taken the paperwork with them in order to conceal the evidence. And I was knocked out immediately after being cut. I don’t remember anything after that.”

His lips press into a thin line. Your force yourself to maintain eye contact. This was your explanation and you could not falter. “Even so. You failed to follow protocol. And you failed to contact the disposal team.”

“There wasn’t time to dial the phone number. Not even time to sound the alarm. I simply reacted on instinct. I was hoping to…”

“To what? What did you think you would accomplish? You, a mere unarmed woman?” He drapes the last word in contempt. You flush, squirming in your seat at the insult.

The suited man sighs heavily, closing your file folder. “You’re going to be suspended without pay for one week. Then I expect you to return to work. Your temporary replacement is…less than ideal. Let me be clear, though: if anything else happens, you’ll be terminated. No debriefing. No excuses. Understood? This is your final warning.”

You nod, saving your sigh of relief for when you’ve exited the office. The air departs your lungs in a loud rush. You’d done it. You’d actually managed to talk your way out of it.

Your thoughts immediately shift to Francis’ doppelgänger.

He was out there, somewhere. The safest move would be to travel, to just flee the area entirely, but you doubt he’ll leave. He’s still here.

You can feel him.

***

You drive to your house, to the home of your childhood. An inheritance from your great grandparents, passed down through each generation. Outside of the city. Quiet. It’s a relief to see green again. The air smells clearer, too. No waste from factory smokestacks or concentrated exhaust from automobiles. A light scent of grass and summer wildflowers. You roll your window down, inhaling deeply. It’s the best you’ve felt in a while. Since before the incident.

Francis. Your good mood departs just as quickly as it had arrived. How terrible a person you are. Lying to save your own skin. To protect the doppelgänger that had killed your beloved milkman. Putting innocent lives at risk. You had no right to feel anything even resembling happiness or contentment. You should turn the car right back around and return to the office. Confess your sins and receive whatever punishment would be decided for you. Imprisonment, certainly. Perhaps a life sentence to match the life that had been stolen from the third floor resident.

You trudge up the steps of the porch, sinking down onto the topmost stair, your head resting against the post of the railing. There are strips of paint peeling, you notice. You’ll need to sand them down before you apply more stain. Something to occupy you during your week off. Distract you from your own misery.

You close your eyes and listen to the hum of insects. There is another scent in the air now; something damp. The sky’s clouds were white and fluffy looking, but you know those can change in an instant. You think there is a storm approaching.

Perhaps you will wait it out. Just rest here and see what happens, studying your surroundings. There are birds singing in the vacant field that hasn’t known crops for many seasons. You only tended a much smaller one close to the house. Some vegetables. That was all. More often than not the local wildlife took a sample, but you didn’t mind sharing. You should have a look before you head back inside later on, see if there is anything to harvest.

It’s comfortable here. The sun is at the perfect angle. You still have plenty of shade. Warm enough to warrant rolling your shirt sleeves back. Catching sight of the scabbed, sutured line marring your forearm. You trace the mark. You think about the copycat tracing your cheek. That final kiss before he’d knocked you unconscious. It made so little sense to let you live. Had some remnant of Francis’ psyche influenced him somehow? Urging him to spare you?

Your eyes slide closed and you drift off to sleep still mulling this over.

***

In the dream you are standing in the nearby orchard.

You know it is a dream, because in reality these fruit trees are no longer tended. Yet here you are, standing beneath the crooked branches of one peach bearing specimen. The many smooth emerald leaves shield you from the sun.

Francis is beside you.

Or not-Francis. You cannot say which it is. The smile is as you remember. The perpetually tired eyes. He reaches for one of the velvet skinned fruits, plucking it easily and handing it to you.

The texture is exactly as it should be. Not too firm and not too soft. Ripe and ready to take a bite from. You do so, your teeth sinking into the soft yellow flesh. A burst of sweetness on your tongue. The excess juice drips down your chin. You offer the peach to the milkman but he doesn’t accept, instead moving to take a taste of it from your face, first doting on your lips before he laps at the dribbling trail. You clutch his shirt and his kisses become rougher. Pushing you gently to the ground. You drop the fruit and your hands become full of his shirt, his hair, the soft earth beneath you. His mouth plants kisses along your cheeks, your jaw, your neck. Hand dragging down through the floral patterned button front dress you’re wearing.

“Francis.” You reach for his face. It’s wrong. Something in the structure of the nose. So subtle it could easily be mistaken. The teeth suddenly bared in a smile that’s unfriendly. A grin of triumph. It isn’t Francis. You’ve been duped by an imposter.

The skin ripples. His eyes become bloodshot. You struggle to move. Your wrists are pinned at your sides. Sharp teeth nipping at the skin of your throat. A wolf ready to destroy its prey.

The thunder awakens you.

You jolt upright, massaging your stiff neck as you glance around hurriedly. The sky is a mass of gray clouds now, the natural illumination of the heavens notably dimmed. The air is laced with the scent of petrichor. You rise and the first drops of rain fall, pattering on your bare arms, sinking into you hair. Another disgruntled warning rumble, louder this time. The interval between that and the next shortening. You’re about to turn and enter the house when you see a figure standing nearby, on the outskirts of the side yard.

It’s him. The imposter that took over Francis.

The normally pristine, starched uniform is dirt stained, collecting souvenirs from the unpaved road leading to your house. The bowtie around his neck is loosened, draped around the unbuttoned shirt collar, the first several buttons of that work shirt similarly unfastened, revealing the white undershirt beneath. He’d never bothered retrieving the hat, the uncovered thatch of thick chestnut hair now tousled. Your fingers curl around the railing for support as he begins walking towards you with determined strides, closing the distance rapidly. The thunderstorm’s namesake harbinger sounds again. A flash of lightning. The rain is no longer a faint scattering of drops, now falling in an earnest deluge.

You both manage to escape being drenched, finding shelter beneath the porch roof in the knick of time, the imposter halting just in front of you. His chest is rapidly rising and falling, as if that brief exercise he’d just participated in was taxing him. You know that’s not the reason for those panted gasps for air, your own body mimicking that movement.

“Francis,” you say, but the name is drowned out by the growing ire of the storm.

He moves then, pressing you against the weathered clapboards near the living room window that overlooks the front yard. He cups your face between his hands and his lips crush yours. You respond without hesitation, kissing him back. Not giving yourself time to think about what you’re doing; to recall the dream you’d just had where you’d been destroyed by one of his kind.

“How did you find me?” You gasp when you part for air.

This utterance is barely audible, threaded between the next two bouts of thunder, muffled by the sound of the downpour. He slides his fingers against the harsh furrow on your arm. “I could sense where you were. Tracked you…” The words drowned out once again. His mouth moves close to your ear. “What did you say to them? What happened?”

“They bought it, for the most part, I think. The director is suspicious, though. I got suspended for a week.”

Another flash of lightning. It was foolish to remain outside any longer. You invite him in, struggling to fit the key in the lock, your trembling fingers not cooperating. His hand closes over yours, steadying you. The door surrenders, swinging inward.

It’s dark in the living room. You switch on the nearest lamp and toss your keys on the table.

“I’d offer you something to drink, but I don’t know if you still do that, or…” It was unknown what the doppelgängers consumed for nutrition. Perhaps it would be different now that they could occupy a human body and not merely disguise themselves as one.

“I do. But that can wait.”

“Did you know that would happen? You being able to trace my whereabouts when you cut me?”

“No. It’s uncharted territory. Like so much of…this,” he murmurs.

“You need to call Francis’ workplace. Explain to them that there was a family emergency. That’s the excuse I gave for the sudden absence. The DDD has been looking for you. Well, for him,” you correct yourself.

“They’ll expect me to return at some point.”

“Yes.”

“So you’ll let me in. To dwell there. And what of my brethren?”

“I can’t let them in. You know that.” You swallow nervously. “You can’t harm anyone. If I let you inside, you have to promise me you won’t. You got what you wanted. You got to be one of us. There’s no reason to hurt anyone else.”

A large clap of thunder makes you jump. The doppelgänger moves closer to you, tipping his head to one side thoughtfully. “You think I’ll cooperate?”

“We had a deal. I let you escape. I lied to protect you.”

“And I let you live. Both ends of the bargain fulfilled. There is no obligation beyond that.”

“You don’t want to hurt me.”

“Are you quite sure of that?” One arm circles your waist, drawing you against him. His fingers sift through your hair, tugging your head back slightly. “These hungers for the flesh are so distracting. How your kind manages them…” His voice trails off and his lips touch yours.

The light flickers and dies. You’ve lost electricity, now standing in the darkened room cradled by the deceiver.

“<i>The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep</i>…”

You inhale sharply, thinking of the Bible on Francis’ nightstand. Reading scripture like any good devout soul, learning verses by heart. That memory resurfacing now.

“Francis.” You know it’s no longer him, not in his purest, human essence, but this evolution still holds traces like this that you can’t help but hold dear.

“I’m here, sweetheart.” His hands slide down over the curve of your buttocks as he kisses the corner of your jaw. You guide him towards the nearby couch, watching him sink into the cushions before you climb into his lap, your shoes sliding off and falling to the hardwood floor. You run your fingers through his hair, your mouth ravaging his. It’s the parts of Francis that you love that you’re adoring, you tell yourself. Not the pretender, but the fragments of the man inside he still carries with him. That is what your fingers caress and your mouth cherishes. You unbutton his shirt the rest of the way, then reach for the belt buckle, jerking the leather strap free from the metal, all while your lips and tongue work in a frenzy over his.

The rain and the thunder becomes white noise, a nearly muted sound in the background as you unbutton his pants and pull down the zipper, the metal teeth parting to reveal white briefs. You touch his erection through that thin material, feeling the hard, thick line of it and he hisses, then groans somewhere near your neck.

“Yes, love, that’s what I need…”

You shove your hand beneath the elastic waistband and you make contact with feverish flesh. Another groan from the imposter. You sweep over the head of his cock, realizing he’s circumcised, smoothing leaking precum over the dome before you wrap your fingers around the shaft and begin stroking up and down. He moans into your mouth. It’s not the best angle, your hand a bit squashed awkwardly between your bodies. You slide off his thighs to sit beside him, never breaking contact, still pumping his prick, rolling your fingers over the crest as you reach the top, thumb dragging over the frenulum with each pass. Your tongue dances over his and you feel the arousal leaking from your own sex, soaking your panties.

Another glob of clear fluid oozes from the tip and your mouth waters. You want to taste it. Want to feel him in your mouth.

Your lips abandon his and he frowns, confused until he sees your head bowing over his lap, your body shifting as you engulf his turgid member. Another hissing sound of pleasure as the slightly musky flavor hits your taste buds. You haven’t fully taken him inside yet, only reaching close to halfway, applying suction as you move across that shallow expanse, allowing yourself to become accustomed to the length and girth of him. His fingers touch your head, not applying force, just resting there. You release his cock with a wet popping sound, stroking your saliva over his erection before taking him into your mouth again. You push deeper this time, forcing your lips closer to the base of his cock, to the nest of dark pubic hair. Your throat protests and you gag, the fingers on your head now tightening, pressing, urging you on.

“Sweet girl, that’s it, you can take it. All the way. Fuck.” The curse is something you’d never imagine coming from the milkman’s lips, but you find yourself aroused by it, the depravity of what you’re doing erotic. Your head bobs, dipping lower each time, eliciting an obscene wet squelching sound as his prick collides with your throat. There’s a higher pitch to his sounds of pleasure now. His hips lift to meet you, shoving him in as deep as he can reach while your nostrils flare, searching for a greater air supply.

Your nails dig into this thigh. The loosened belt buckle jingles with each thrust into that moist cavity you’ve provided. The fingers in your hair loosen, allowing you a brief respite. You withdraw and cough. A thick trail of saliva connects your lower lip to his glistening cock. Your fingers massage through the slick and he hums appreciatively. Your lips feel slightly numb, tingling from the stretch. There’s a burning sensation in your abused throat, a soreness when you swallow. But the discomfort is bearable. You want to do this. You want him to feel good.

You suck in a lungful of air and then begin again. You hear the replicant’s breathing becoming shallower, more rapid. He’s getting close. You redouble your efforts, moving fast and deep.

“Sweetheart, you’re going to make me…it’s so fucking good…”

His hips snap up and an acrid spill of semen floods your throat. It catches you by surprise and you choke around the pulsing erection. It’s a copious amount of seed that spills over your retreating tongue. You swallow down the last of the bitter fluid, straightening, dragging the back of your hand across your spit drenched chin.

“That was…you…” The creature is speechless. You can’t help but feel a little pride over that. He captures your lips, mulling over the taste he’s left there. “I want to taste you,” he says, and your pussy throbs. “I want you to cum inside my mouth.”

He moves off the couch, kneeling in front of you. Shoving at your skirt. You hurriedly hook your thumbs over the edge of your panties and drag them down, feeling how wet the crotch is as they drag across your legs. Scooting closer to the edge, spreading yourself open for him.

His face moves forward and his tongue parts your folds. Laving down to gather a sample of your arousal. Humming with approval at the taste of you as he focuses on your clit. A long, slow drag over the sensitive nub. You whimper. His thumbs wedge along either side of your sex, stretching the pink flesh further open. His mouth covers your cunt and he sucks and your thighs try to close, the sensation overwhelming.

“Oh sweetheart, you’re delicious.” Slurping on your clit now. You thread your fingers through his hair, caressing his head as his tongue flicks across the hooded button. He doesn’t need guidance this time. Everything is the way you like it. Dividing attention between your clitoris and the entrance of your pussy. Pushing that muscle inside, fucking you with his tongue, alternating with lapping at your bundle of nerve endings. You wish it wasn’t quite so dark. You want to see his eyes. You know he’s looking at you even if he can’t discern much in the dim gray light filtering in through the windows. Watching your reaction even as he feels it in his mouth. Hears the pleading, the needy gasps and moans, the whining that begins the closer you get to coming apart in his mouth.

He moans, too, and the vibrations of that sound add another layer to your pleasure. A finger makes its way inside you. Violated by a second soon after, thrusting while he sucks your clit. You climax, panting his name over and over, your fingers frantic in his hair, your pelvis quaking as your grind yourself against him.

Eventually your movements lessen. He eases back and your quivering legs draw closed. He rejoins you on the couch, his mouth on yours, gifting you a taste of yourself.

Then you sit quietly, listening to the diminishing storm outside. The rain drums on the roof and taps along the gutters with a soft metallic sound. Your face is tucked into the doppel’s shoulder, one hand resting on his chest, feeling his heartbeat, his arm curled around your shoulders.

You shouldn’t enjoy this. Any of this. You should be afraid, disgusted. Instead you feel oddly calm. Safe in his arms, even though you certainly aren’t. These alien beings were masters of deception and manipulation. You know better. It was foolish, what you were doing. Dangerous—for you, for everyone else.

But you’re convinced more than ever that some part of Francis is still buried within. The goodness of him negating the evil of this imposter.

“I’ll make the call in the morning.” The first words spoken in a long time. Your head lifts. “And I’ll move in to the apartments.”

“Just you. And you won’t harm anyone.”

“You ask for too much.”

“I’m giving up everything for you. Risking my job, my life, the lives of the people I’ve sworn to protect. My heart. My soul,” you finish with a whisper. “I don’t think you understand how many things I’m sacrificing.”

“I’m not human. It’s impossible for me to. There are no words for them in our language because they simply don’t exist.”

“But you want to be us. You should understand…”

“I will make the call and I will move in. Beyond that I am not promising you anything. Except…I do not want you harmed.” He reaches for your arm, tracing over the healing wound he’d inflicted. “I will try to prevent that, at least.”

A small concession, perhaps, but an important one nonetheless. If he was willing to spare you, maybe you could convince him to spare others.

Teach him the value of a human life while taming the monster within that wears the face of the man you love.

#francis mosses #francis mosses x reader #francis mosses x you #milkman #milkman x reader #milkman x you #thats not my neighbor

[tinyluvs]

Giving Spencer a blow job for the first time?

ooh i’ve had a few requests for this 🤭 tysm! angel! *mdni!!*

"sorry angel," spencer sighs when you gasp at his cock hardening against your ass, "it'll go away," he hums pressing a kiss against your shoulder, leaving his lips there for a few seconds afterwards

he angles his hips away from you, causing you to whine slightly, "why are you sorry?" you ask quietly, doing your best to turn around to face him, your chest pressed against his

it wasn't a secret to you that spencer had never really done anything with someone else, apart from a few kisses here and there but it was your fault he was hard, you'd tried to get comfy and in turn had wiggled your ass against his crotch just a few too many times

spencer's eyes flutter shut, long lashes touching his cheek, when your noses brush, "baby?" you prompt him, with a gentle kiss against the corner of his mouth, "why are you sorry?"

"because," he pauses, his fingers pinching lightly at your waist, "i've never, you know, well i know how to i just haven't ever done it, with someone," he rambles ever so quietly against your mouth

you hum and smile softly against his jaw, "would you like to? with me?" you ask, letting your fingers slide just under the waistband of his pyjama trousers

"i don't know how to," he repeats, his fingers moving from your waist to wrap gently around your wrist. you stop, waiting to see if he pulls your hand away from him but he doesn't, he just holds you there

"i know," you say with a slight grunt as you rearrange your bodies until you're hovering over him, knees pressed against his hips, "let me teach you something for once,"

spencer gasps when you kiss him, his chin tilting upwards to chase you as you pull away, "you don't have to," he pants, watching you shuffle down his body and into the space between his legs

"i want to," you assure him, eyes flickering from his face and down to his cock, still very hard and pressing against his trousers. your tongue darts over your bottom lip as you lean in, nudging the hem of his t-shirt up with your nose

you trail kisses over his hips, sucking and licking gently at the soft skin, smirking against him when he starts to roll his hips against you, "oh god," he whimpers, fingers pushing through your hair

"you okay?" you check in, pulling the waistband of his trousers away from him, he nods at you, his tongue pressed between his lips, "lift up baby," you hum, tapping as his hip

spencer rolls his hips again, lifting them up just enough for you to tug the fabric down his thighs, letting his cock spring free. your mouth waters at the sight of him, thick, long and leaking pre come over himself

your thumb traces over a vein on the underside of him, following it upwards until you get to the tip. spencer moans at the friction, titling his head back against the arm of the couch while his fingers start to tighten in your hair

"fuck spence," you breathe hard as you start to rub over his slit, watching intently as his cock leaks against your fingers. following the same vein, you kiss up the length of him, stopping when your lips are smeared with pre come

"please, fuck sweetheart," spencer pants, looking down at you with soft, desperate eyes. slowly you lower your mouth onto him, eyes fluttering shut as you start to suckle

you know you're teasing him, moving down his cock too slowly but he sounds so good, whining and moaning when your tongue presses against him, your cheeks hollowing as he hits the back of your throat

"b-baby, god," he moans, pushing down slightly on the back of your head. you hum around him, sending vibrations tickling over his cock. spencer groans loudly, his hips pushing up again, causing you to choke around him, "honey, im so so-"

your eyes flicker up, looking at him through your lashes, keeping the eye contact as you start to suck him off, moving your mouth up and down his length, your lips stretched wide around him

spencer's jaw drops, a string of moans tumbling past his lips that has you whimpering. spit and pre come leak from the corner of your mouth, dribbling down the base of him that won't fit in your mouth, gently you wrap your fingers around him, sliding your hand up and down slowly

"sweetheart i'm not going to, fuck, last," he hiccups, the hand he has in your hair starts to move, pushing you down and pulling you back up, bobbing you on his cock while tears start to prick at the corners of your eyes

you do your best to make an uh huh sound around him, not wanting to take your mouth off of him just yet. he starts to twitch in your mouth, veins pulsing against your tongue as you lick upwards before flicking just under the head of his cock

tears start to spill down your face, rendering you a complete state between that and the mess spilling from the corners of your mouth. you reposition yourself so that your free hand can ghost over his balls, barely touching them

"p-please, oh, don't tease," spencer whines, his back arching slightly, his stomach tensing. he's close and you know it so you go all in, sucking him off with earnest, one hand wrapped around the base of his cock while the other gently rolls his balls

spencer starts to moan and grunt loudly, barely taking a moment to breathe in between it all. his hips stutter, pushing the tip of his cock into your throat

"fuck, baby, oh god," he rambles loudly, "y-you're so good at this, so good," he whines, his voice breaking slightly, you look up, eyes widening when you see a few stray tears running down his cheeks

a moan tries to escape you but it gets trapped in your throat, your muscles contracting around him, "oh fuck, wha- how're you doing that, please, i'm gonn-"

without much of a warning spencer comes, loudly. your eyes snap shut, come spilling down your throat in long, warm ropes that never seem to end. you do your best to swallow fast enough to keep up but to no avail, come runs down your chin

"holy shit," you choke, voice raw, when you pull off of him. you use the back your hand to wipe over your face, come, spit and tears leaving stains on the sleeve of your hoodie, "you okay?" you pant, resting your forehead on spencer's hip

"perfect," your boyfriend replies, voice slow and lazy, post orgasm haze setting in fast. his fingers scratch slightly at your head, "i love you, so much"

thanks for reading! remember to like! reblog! and comment! i’ll give you a smooch if you do, ily!! send prompts to my ask box!

if you’d like to read the part two of spencer eating you out directly after this you can do so !! here !!

❥ spencer reid masterlist !!

tell me if there’s any mistakes! i tried to proofread but i’m tired 😌

#❥ my works #spencer reid #spencer reid smut #spencer reid x fem!reader smut #spencer reid blurb #spencer reid x y/n #spencer reid x fem!reader #spencer reid fluff #spencer reid drabble #spencer reid x reader #criminal minds #criminal minds smut #❥ my spencer works #❥ spencer reid drabbles #❥ spencer reid #❥ spencer reid fic rec

[augustinewrites]

last kiss + nanami

nanami has always been an early riser. usually he’s out of bed by seven, lacing up running shoes to head out for a jog and start his day with a rush of endorphins.

but some days nanami likes to wake slowly (and get his endorphins elsewhere).

he’s been awake for a while now, just floating in the blissful quiet of the apartment. he knows there’s a laundry list of tasks awaiting him outside the bedroom door, but today he just…doesn’t feel like tackling them quite yet. 

you stir into semi-wakefulness as nanami places a featherlight kiss to your brow bone.

“good morning,” he murmurs when your sleepy gaze finds his, fingertips skimming across your arm, leaving a trail of goosebumps in their wake.

“morning,” you sigh. “what’s on the schedule for today?”

“gojo needs some help at the school,” he tells you, beginning to sit up. “i’m going to the store to pick up candy afterwards. and a toothbrush for yuuji—”

“gojo can handle things on his own,” you huff as if he’s personally offended you, hauling yourself up and settling yourself atop nanami’s lap. “i already bought the toothbrush, and we have more than enough candy for tonight. stay in with me. please?”

it’s a tempting, tempting offer. he’d give anything to spend the day in bed with you, tangled in each other's limbs and twisted in bedsheets. 

he’s nearly a lost cause when you lean into his space, pressing your lips to his. it’s dizzying to be wanted by you. addicting, even.

his hands drop to your waist to pull your flush against him, then slide up the hem of the shirt you’d stolen to glide up the warm expanse of your back. you pull back just long enough to breathe, hands braced on his shoulders. 

he studies you for a moment. his darling. his beloved. 

“i love you,” he says. he’s said it to you over a dozen times by now, but finds himself meaning it more and more with each instance.

you whisper it back as he places another slow kiss to the hollow of your throat, fingers tangling in his hair. his lips trail up your neck to your jaw, by your ear, your cheek, and finally your lips once more.

“i thought you had to meet gojo—”

nanami shifts, hands gripping the bottom of your thighs to pull your hips closer to his. 

“you started it.”

____

nanami’s already changed by the time you manage to get across the room on your shaky legs, arms wrapping around his torso and chest pressed against his back. 

you take a moment to admire both of you in the mirror. since you both were young, he’s carried this self-imposed weight across his shoulders that you’d struggled with relieving him off. 

now, he looks more content and relaxed than you’ve seen him in a long time. your heart swells with affection and pride. 

“you can’t just leave me unsatisfied—”

“i satisfied you four times, you insatiable minx,” he chuckles, grabbing your hands to place a kiss to the back of it before slipping out of your grasp. “i’m already late.”

“kento,” you pout as you sit up, realizing there’s no distracting him a second time. “promise you’ll hurry back? i have a surprise for you.”

“a surprise? well, consider me motivated.”

you crack a grin at that, reaching out and tugging him forward by the tie. nanami gently cups the back of your head, tilting your head up slightly to kiss you. it’s slow and deep, a million words condensed into a single moment. 

“bye, love,” you murmur when he pulls away. “see you soon.”

#nanami x reader #nanami kento x reader #jjk x reader #jjk fluff #nanami fluff #nanami x you #[—augustine’s two year celebration!]

[hanasnx]

thigh fucking

MINORS DNI 18+ WARNINGS: f!reader | dom!jason | degradation | sexual content | thigh fucking | hair pulling | anal mention.

JASON TODD never gave a fuck about thighs until he saw yours. Gorgeous, supple, edible. His teeth ached to sink into that tissue, especially when you stuff them into your thigh high socks. You’ve gotta know what you do to him in those. Strutting around without a care in the world, not expecting to get thrown down and taken advantage of.

“Jay… please.” you whine, desperate.

“Should’ve… mmph… fuckin’ thought of that.” Barely able to hold it together, he’s scolding you through his grunts, throwing his head back to focus on the wall so he doesn’t bust early and ruin the fun. There’s no way you’re getting dicked down right now when your fat thighs are hugging him so well. To make sure they stay good and tight for him, his hands palm either sides, squeezing them together. Despite your squirming, he’s still getting decently off. “Stay still, bitch. Goddamn.”

“Can’t help it.” you reply with a whimper, constantly being reminded of a dick sliding between your slick thighs and your sore cunt is screaming for it. “Want you so bad.”

“Shouldn’t have worn these fucking socks. You know how these get me.” Hollow admonishments because once his concentration is back on what his cock looks like between a pair of thighs, that’s all his attention is on. A finger hooks into the hem of one of the socks, and snaps it against your skin. You jolt, emitting an indignant yet aroused squeak. Moisture seeps out from your panties, accumulating and wetting his entry. Tremors in your pelvis beg him to reconsider, but he’s not done fucking your thighs. “Imagine that. Bully you a little bit and you’re dripping all over me. S’almost like you like this fucked up shit.” One hand releases your flesh to grab at your hair, putting a firm grip on it to make you face him, instead of watching his cock. Ashamed, you cast your eyes down, features skewed from the sting. “You like being called a little bitch? Huh? If your cunt wants to get fucked, it better show me it can cum from just this.”

“Jay—“ your pitchy voice is immediately cut off by his interjection.

“Nah, ah. Any back talk and I’m fucking your ass next.”

#indy: drabbles #1k #jason todd drabble #ch: jason #jason todd smut #jason todd x reader #jason todd x fem!reader #jason todd x you #jason todd x y/n #jason todd imagine #jason todd fic #jason todd fanfiction #arkham knight smut #arkham knight x reader #red hood smut #red hood x reader #reader insert

[wol-fica]

Tara giving reader head while gaming (gip)

summary - ^ (added some more stuff to make it spicier)

an - now i wanna go to my gfs house

—————————

“Babe?” You called, eyes focused on the screen in front of you, “Can you bring me my water bottle?”

It was a boring Monday afternoon, school being out due to the aggressive snow storm happening outside. You lived off campus, meaning it would be way too dangerous to drive on the icy and slippery streets of New York.

Conveniently, you had your gaming setup at your apartment, which meant you had entertainment for at least a little while instead of just sulking around bored.

Oh, and your girlfriend lives with you, what a plus!

Tara moved in with you about a year after your relationship started, being that she needed time to recover from ghost face and her older sister was not keen on you and her baby sister screwing around all alone.

Sam eventually caved though, and Tara was quick to pack up all of her belongings and move right into your space. Her decoration and tastes were soon mixed with yours, and you both fell into an easy rhythm of living with each other. It was nice to be able to wake up to her, and even nicer having her around whenever you needed her to be.

“Here baby.” Tara said, placing the water bottle on your desk and planting a kiss to your cheek, “How’s the game going?”

“Meh, this quest isn’t that fun.” You murmured, aggressively shooting down an enemy attempting to attack you, “Thank you for bringing me that.”

“No problem.” She replied, resting her hands on your shoulders and rubbing, “Do you know when you’ll be done?”

“Not sure, I don’t know how long this storyline will last.” You said, zoning in on hitting headshots on enemies, “Why? Do you need me for something.”

Tara hummed, leaning down so her mouth was by your ear. Her breath fanned out over your neck, tingling your skin with a warm sting.

“I do need you for…something.” Tara purred, licking along your jugular, “But you seem busy so I’ll just help myself.”

You shuddered, clicking to the pause menu before turning to her, “What do you mean?”

She smirked, walking around until she stood in front of your desk, and kneeled down. She grabbed the legs of your chair, yanking it forward until it was close enough for her chin to rest against your knee. She kissed the exposed skin of your thigh before scooching forward until she was face to face with your crotch.

“Play your game baby, don’t mind me.” Tara said, gazing up at you innocently while waiting for you to unpause your game.

You stared back at her for a moment, weighing your options before slowly bringing your eyes up to the screen and returning to the quest. Once the sound of your game resuming hit Tara’s ears, she eagerly undid the tie of your shorts and pulled the hem down enough to reveal your boxers.

You felt her fingers slip under the waistband of your underwear, and sucked in a breath when she pulled those down as well. She pressed a chaste yet calming kiss to your hipbone before leaning back and taking your tip in between her lips.

“Jesus.” You breathed, gritting your teeth at the small suction she was making with her mouth.

Your hands slid off of your keyboard, wanting to tangle into her hair, but she immediately slapped you away, sinking her teeth into your sensitive skin.

“FUCK!” You winced, looking down at her with wide eyes, “Tara!”

She gave you a look of warning that said “don’t do that again” before opening her jaw wider and taking a few more inches into her mouth. You watched with wide eyes as she hollowed her cheeks and began to suck rhythmically.

The feeling was incredible, being that Tara was an experienced girl and you haven’t had your dick sucked in such a long time that you almost forgot about how good it felt. She made sure to do it just how you liked though, running her tongue along your length and eagerly slurping you down.

She was soon deep throating you, the swollen head of your cock buried in the back of her throat. Your size caused her to gag a bit, but that didn’t stop her from swallowing.

Your orgasm came way faster than expected, building up quite quickly and causing you to loose your senses for a moment.

“Shit.” You groaned, letting the hot knot snap, your cum shooting down her throat, “F-fuck…Tara…”

“Shhh.” Tara murmured, giving your tip a gentle kiss before climbing up into your lap, “Let me take care of you.”

You gulped, inhaling sharply when she positioned herself above your saliva covered cock. She gave you a look, licking her lips before carefully yet swiftly dropping herself onto you.

Your eyes squeezed shut, mouth falling open with a guttural moan. She responded, grinding her hips down into you to feel your full length. Her breath was ragged, drawing in and out heavily while she adjusted.

“Keep playing.” She murmured, walls pulsing around you, “Finish your quest.”

“Tara.” You whined, wanting to hold her hips and help her ride you, but she glared at up at you, proceeded to lift herself up, and slam herself on your length.

“Keep. Playing.” She growled, rolling her hips left and right while you whimpered, “Or you’ll be in a lot of trouble later.”

You nodded with a bit lip, picking up your controller with shaking hands and proceeding on with your game. Once Tara was satisfied with your progression, she began to slowly ride you.

Her hips would rock back and forth on you, occasionally jerking forward and up to get a reaction out of you. A few small moans would slip past your lips, but her hand slid up to choke you, so you did your best to keep quiet.

“Good girl.” Tara panted, teeth clenched while she rode you, “Doing everythingI I say.”

You froze up, suddenly coming to your senses. Tara was a lot smaller than you, and you could easily pick her up and turn the tables on her, so why were you just sitting here and letting her ruin you? Should you just let her have her fun?

Nah.

You paused your game, setting your controller down on your desk. Tara stopped moving, raising her eyebrows at you and opening her mouth to scold you for not continuing to play, but before she could even get a syllable out, you flipped her around and bent her over your desk.

She gasped, a throaty moan following suit when you quickly reentered her. Her walls gave way to you, her pussy stretching open for your immense size while you forced her legs apart.

“MMM FUCK!” She moaned, gripping onto the edge of your desk while your hips drove into hers, “Y/N!”

“Shhh.” You cooed, nudging her knees farther apart, “Let me ruin you.”

She whined pathetically, eyes squeezing shut and mouth dropped open while you fucked her. One of your hands was in her hair, pulling and yanking at the fluffy locks, while the other was torturing her already abused clit.

Tara was being manhandled.

And she loved it.

“I know you’re close sweet girl, hold it just a little longer.” You whispered to her, planting a soft kiss to her cheek when she let out a cry of pleasure.

You drove your hips a little harder, grunting softly in her ear while you chased your own high. You reached the peak faster than expected, and pushed yourself as deep as you could go when your orgasm came.

“Go ahead, relax.” You coaxed to Tara, rubbing her hip when she let out a shaky moan from her own release.

You both were unmoving for a moment, breathing heavily in sync before you broke the silence.

“Thanks for riling me up.” You joked, pressing a gentle kiss to the nape of her neck, “Really got me going on you.”

“That was the goal.” She mumbled sarcastically, wiggling her hips against you in a teasing manner.

“Was it now?” You replied, holding back a moan when she purposefully clenched down hard on your cock.

“Yeah…wanted you to fuck me.” She turned her head back to you, still clenching and wiggling her hips, “You should keep going.”

You stared at her, weighing your options, before standing up and taking her hips in your hands. You drew your pelvis back, before letting loose and pounding yourself into her.

Her screams could be heard throughout your apartment the whole night, echoing down the halls and filling the space with sounds of arousal.

The neighbors weren’t happy, but who cares.

You still got some pussy.

——————————

surprise

taglist: @cartierdreamx@tundra1029@red1culous@vorsdany@andsoigotabutterfly@theafterofnevermore@yomomisgay@house-of-lovin@slvt4lanadelrey@thenextdawn@nepobaby08@dunohilly@somekindofpoet@alexkolax@cinffy23@pedrosprincess@amberfreemansburntface@myfturn

#tara carpenter icons #tara carpenter smut #tara carpenter imagine #tara carpenter x reader #tara carpenter #tara carpenter x female reader #tara carpenter x you #tara carpenter x y/n #jenna ortega icons #jenna x reader #jenna #jennaortegaedit #jenna ortega #jenna ortega fluff #jenna ortega imagine #jenna ortega smut #jenna ortega x fem reader #jenna ortega x fem!reader #jenna ortega x reader #jenna ortega x y/n #jenna ortega x you

[hornyjail23]

Here is the second story to the poll I had

Dom tentacle monster x reader

You went down to the beach to relax. As you walked along, you found a small cave in the rocks. You decided to go explore. You could tell from the tide pools that the tide would rise enough to come into the cave but not so much as you wouldn't be able to get out at high tide.

As you looked through the tide pools you felt a small grasp on your ankle. You were expecting a small inquisitive octopus but instead you only saw a long tentacle reaching out of a small hole.

You watched as it slowly wrapped itself around your leg as another tentacle immerged from the hole. You knew what was happening. You read stories in the news of tentacle monsters but they were always far off. You didn't expect to find one so close to home. You could feel yourself get aroused as the tip of the first tentacle reached the hem of your swimsuit and the other started up your other ankle.

You take a few steps further deeper into the cave, away from the wave pools with the hard rocks to the softer sands as the tentacle monster following you. You sit down in the sand as it fully comes out of its hole. It watches you closely as it begins tugging down your bottoms to your knees.

You're not sure if it could smell your arousal or just seeing it free of clothing but the monster sped up it's advances on you. Both of your legs were now wrapped with the tentacles and others were now feeling it's way up your body to pinch around your nipples, occasionally sucking on it with a sucker and pulling up, making a popping sound.

It is now rubbing on your bits. You were biting your lip to stop from moaning out loud as it proceeded to lube you up with it's juices. Two small tentacles begins slowly stretching your ass as 1 keep rubbing on your front.

It finally found your sensitive spot. You couldn't help but loudly moan out and snap your legs shut on the tentacles. It quickly regain control and forces your legs back open as another tentacle is now muffling your moans as it pushes it way into your mouth. You try to stop it from rubbing that spot but as soon as you touch the tentacle monster, more tentacles wrap around your wrists and pin them to your side.

As if you weren't even pushing and struggling back, it folds your legs up and wraps the tentacles around your wrists and legs together. 'If this was a person, they would have you in a mating press,' you thought. As if it heard your thoughts, the tentacles working on you enter you and keep rubbing your sweet spot. You instantly cummed against it. But the monster wasn't done with you.

It adjusted itself until it's mouth was over your front and began licking up the mess you made from your orgasm. The whole time, it continued to pump in and out of your holes as if you never came. Once you were cleaned up with it's tongue, it made you a mess again by cumming all over, in and on you.

You felt it relax a bit. You were now allow to get up but it still hung on to you, it's tentacles still in you. You went to walk over towards the exit before tide got to high, it found a large rock to bend you over and began fucking you some more. Your eyes rolled up from the fresh feeling. You were already so full from it's last orgasm that you could feel it oozing out as it thrusted in.

You could feel the tentacles were getting rougher with you. It pulled harder on your nipples. You can feel that it was now leaving function marks all over your body. The tentacle that is fucking your mouth wrapped around your throat as it began to fuck itself deeper down your throat, you could feel it tighten as the bulge of tip worked it's way down your throat. The tentacles that were holding your legs open were joining the others to stretch you further and fill you up more.

This time you came again with the monster. When is pulled is self out of you, you felt hollow. You rolled over onto your back. You watched it retreat back to the hole it first came from. But now high tide was in. You could swim out. Well normally you could but now your legs were noodles. There is no way you could swim out now.

You looked at your body and it was covered in dots and spots of all different sizes from the suckers. You decided that your only option was to take a nap and wait either for the tide to roll back out or until your legs had strength.

When you awoke, you could see the tide did recede. But you couldn't move. There was the tentacle monster again lubing you up. But it appears it has told it's buddies as there was 2 more now working there way to you. You can't believe it yourself but you already felt excited with what was to come.

#monster fucker #monster smut #dom monster #getting fucked by a monster #tentacle monster

[charlesfairies]

She only wants to take a nap

#fairies art #beautiful fairies #cute fairies #lovely fairies #fairies #hem fairy #abdul fairy #lilly fairy #pixie hollow art #pixie hollow

[luveline]

𝐚 𝐭𝐡𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐝 𝐨𝐟 𝐭𝐢𝐦𝐞 | 𝐞𝐝𝐝𝐢𝐞 𝐦𝐮𝐧𝐬𝐨𝐧

eddie wakes up with a red string tied from his finger to yours, no idea where he got it, and no idea how to tell you that you're caught on the end of it. soulmate!au. fem!reader, 16k.

content warnings mentioned issues with self image, implied body dysmorphia, reader is insecure/a touch shy, alcohol, a short kiss after one character has been drinking, weed mentioned but not used by eddie or reader. please read with care! requested here ♡

˚ʚ♡ɞ˚

Eddie remembers the party in flashes. The feeling of his thick-soled creepers caught on the floor, wings in fly paper. Someone's headphones cracking like a wishbone between two hands and a fist fight in the backyard. Your hair touching some degenerate's cheek as they leaned down to kiss you, and the shudder that ran through you as you opened your mouth. Beer. Beer, cheap wine, another beer. 

While he realises the beer may be fogging his memory, none of the fractures explain the piece of string tied to the marriage finger on his left hand.

He stands in the tiny trailer bathroom with his back against the door, the hustle and bustle of his Uncle Wayne's morning routine filtering through the flimsy door. It bends under his weight. Anymore pushing and it'll fly off the hinges.

The string withstands reasoning. Eddie wasn't particularly alarmed when he couldn't slide it off of his finger that morning, half-falling out of bed and desperate for the bathroom. He figured himself the victim of an elaborate prank, toppling out of bed to follow the red string where it stood taut. He chased it to the door and gave up when he realised that it disappeared down the dark stretch of road leading out of the Hills. 

Panic set in somewhere between peeing and a pair of scissors falling apart around the string in the kitchen. Like even the touch of the string was an insult, uncuttable. 

From there he tried yanking, buttering, slicing. The butter made his fingers greasy and the knife went dull. To the touch, the string is thin. Twelve pieces of strand like doubled embroidery thread, plain cotton to the eye, maybe polyester if the minimal iridescent shine is a clue. He can spread it out between his fingers and thumb, he just can't cut it off.

"Eddie, what the fuck did you do?" 

Eddie winces and drops his hand from his eyes. The string slides down the doorway where it's trapped with a light shushing.  

"What?" Eddie shouts back to Wayne. 

"Don't what me, son! Come here." 

Eddie groans and hangs his head. Pissed, he scrounges through the laundry for a shirt that's in acceptable condition and attempts to put it on but the insufferable string refuses to play nice. It bends, snags, and Eddie can't find a way to get it off —he has to pull the string toward him, pleased if sceptical to find that despite its taut nature, it will allow him enough length to get an arm through his sleeve. 

"What the fuck," he mutters, looking at the mirror in disbelief. The purple-yellow bruise haunting the hollow of his right eye has shrunk since last night, to his relief. Upon reflection, Eddie doesn't think it'll draw much attention. 

The string doubles back on itself, a red line up the length of his arm to his armpit where it disappears into the sleeve. From there, it snakes down his stomach to pull out from the bottom hem. 

If whoever has the other end of the string decides to pull, his shirt will rise up. Awesome. Really great. He's a fucking streaker.

"Edward Albert Munson, if you don't get in here!" 

"Wayne," Eddie says, pushing open the bathroom door with a suffering sigh, "what do you want me to say? I can't get the fucking thing off'a me." 

Wayne is thoroughly unimpressed where he stands in the kitchen, arms crossed over his chest and gaze on the countertop by the sink. 

Eddie's confused at first, complaint dying on his lips as he remembers the mess he made in a mad dash for freedom half an hour ago. Butter shines yellow and melted on a small plate, the broken scissors tossed frustratedly aside, a useless knife in similar fashion at the bottom of the sink. 

"What the fuck, Eds?" Wayne asks.

Eddie holds up his hand. "I don't know!" he says, exasperated, eyebrows halfway up his forehead. "I woke up with it, I can't get rid of it." 

Wayne's turn to be confused. But, like his newphew's, his confusion doesn't last long. "What happened to your eye?" 

"The string?" Eddie asks, waving his red string around for emphasis. Bruises are commonplace, were nearly normal the summer between nine and tenth grade, this weird magic string is anything but. 

"That what kids are calling shiners?"  Wayne asks, taking Eddie's face in a rough hand. "At least say you got one in too." 

"I don't remember." 

"You don't remember?" Wayne asks, a mixture of unimpressed and horrified. 

"No, I…" He bats Wayne's hand away, giving his tired-faced uncle an abashed smile. "It's fine, Wayne. I was at Gareth's last night." 

"Ah, well that explains it. What does your bruise have to do with the state of my kitchen? You try cutting it off?" 

Eddie turns from Wayne to grab the scissors and knife. He wraps both in paper towel until the sharps (or not so sharps) are covered and tosses them in the trash, scrounging for a bottle of bleach under the sink to wipe away his buttery mess. "You're focused on the wrong disaster, Wayne. Like, I tried following the string out the door and it's a half a mile long. I'm gonna follow it in the van." 

"Is this, like, a trend? Speaking in tongues to get out of trouble?" 

"What are you confused about?" Eddie asks, spinning back to hold his hand in Wayne's face. 

Wayne doesn't look like Eddie, he's not so dark in the hair or eyes, and he obviously doesn't look like Eddie's mom, but the smile he gives him now was one Eddie's mom wore all the time, enduringly fond. Wayne takes Eddie's hand, turning his nephew's palm this way and that as the string slithers against pale knuckles. It almost writhes. 

"What am I supposed to be seeing?" 

"That's not funny." 

"I'm not joking." 

"Wayne," Eddie says, his shirt rising as he pulls on the string to catch the light. It shines in a way that isn't normal, too many colours like the scale of a deep sea fish. "This!" 

"Right… I can't see whatever it is you're seeing. How hard did you get hit? Jesus, I asked you to stop getting yourself in these messes, you could get seriously hurt."

Wayne doesn't waste another second looking through Eddie's string. The weight of a long shift rests between his shoulders, abates as he brings the chipped rim of a Garfield mug to his lips. Eddie swears the chubby cat is mocking him, cruel eyes smirking at his misfortune.

"Unbelievable," Eddie mutters, ditching the whole scene in search of his dingy black sneakers. 

Wayne chuckles and opens the cabinet where they keep their cookies and coffee cakes, calling, "You want breakfast?" 

"No! I have delusions to attend to. Need anything while I'm out?" 

"A new pair of scissors."

Eddie pretends to stab himself in the eye by the front door, over and over. His frustration calms. He slips into loose laced sneakers and grabs his jacket where it's hanging on the coat rack, digging for his keys.  He elbows the door ajar, and doesn't notice his van isn't in the driveway until he's standing at the bottom of the porch steps, flabbergasted. 

"Did you wanna borrow the sierra?" Wayne asks from the door. 

Garfield looks on in silent judgement. 

Wayne generously lends Eddie the sierra. He's relieved when he shuts the door on his string and it behaves like regular old string (which is to say, it doesn't buckle the metal), but then he tries to grab the steering wheel and his finger almost pulls from the socket, stopped by the string. His relief ends. 

"Fuck fuck fuck," he says, opening the door, gathering some string and closing it again. Righted, he pulls his shirt back down his torso and starts the car. 

Eddie's hoping he can follow the string to its beginning, but at this point he's sure he got his shit rocked hard enough to forget being hexed by a devious yet loveable warlock —the string can't be a real string. It doesn't tangle around the wheels of the car as he drives over the faint line of it leading from Forest Hills into Hawkins' town centre, it just vanishes, like Eddie's winding it around a bobbin. 

He takes the first exit on the traffic circle reluctantly, away from the string and toward Gareth's house, where Eddie assumes he left his beloved van. He can't believe how wasted he must have been, and now that he's accepted the string as an irksome constant but prioritised it below van retrieval, the hangover he should definitely have rears a head. His stomach hurts, his eyes are sand, you were fucking kissing somebody else last night— 

Eddie might throw up. He rolls down the window and sticks his head as far out of it as he can justify while driving. The roads are quiet, a late morning in Hawkins pockmarked by the burr of lawn mowers chewing up perfect lawns and the spray of illegal sprinklers. The sun emerges slowly and then all at once, licking his naked arms with the promise of sunburn should he continue the day unprotected. Eddie never seems to tan. He hates the sun, anyway, the glare of it bouncing off of the road in a blinding dotted line. He unfolds the visor over his seat.

Needless to say, he's in a shitty mood when he finally gets to Gareth's house, spying his van wedged in the driveway between a miscellaneous ford and a buick.

Hungover, too hot, trying not to panic about the red string choking his knuckle. It can't seem to decide on how tight or loose it's going to sit. It tightens as he climbs out of the sierra, loosens as he walks toward his van. 

"Hey, gorgeous," he says, patting her freshly lacquered body with love. She's all jet black now, rust buffed and wheels shiny. 

There are bikes crowded against the house wall like toppled dominoes. The window shades are closed but the door is wide open the hinges, the sharp smell of booze wafting out into the sun. Give it enough time and Eddie's sure the sun'll bake all the milling bodies into a brand new smell. 

"Hey, man," Jamison greets, sitting on the kitchen counter and unfairly put together considering the bottle of sours he demolished alone last night, "you survived." 

Gareth is face down at the table next to a plate of cold toast, jelly congealed. Jeff stands by the patio door smoking a cigarette that smells exciting, and Macy stands doing the dishes at the sink.

"Got the girl doing the dishes. Classy," Eddie says.

Macy drops the sponge she's using into the water, soap bubbles dripping from her fingers. "Thanks for offering." 

He relents. The mess they've made —and it is generous to call it a mess, more apt might be an explosion, or a weather event— is extensive. Pizza boxes upturned, tomato sauce and stringy cheese smashed into the fridge like a modern art piece you'd see at MOMA. Eddie wouldn't put it past drunk or high him to have done it, declaring some statement of pretentious high horsery, so he doesn't comment on it. If it was him, he doesn't wanna know. 

"Some party," Jeff says through smoke. 

Eddie pulls the stopper out of the sink to let the water drain. He doesn't roll like that. "What the fuck happened?" 

Gareth rouses at Eddie's question, said as it is with vigour, and remembers his toast. He takes a bite and turns in his seat to blink blearily at Eddie. For a second, Eddie kids himself into thinking his friend can see the string currently spilling water onto the floor like a tightwire. 

"You lost your shit and wrecked my house, you stupid bastard." 

Eddie looks to Jamison, as if to say, that true?

Jamison pushes a long arm behind his back and stretches. "Y/N was hooking up with Cory Wilson and you took it like a champ, in my opinion. We had a good time." 

"She hooked up with Wilson?" he asks, dread pooling in his stomach. The string shudders as you had, Eddie remembers, your chin tilted up and your eyes closing into sweet dark lines, painted lashes squeezed together. 

"She took you home," Macy says, muffled, a hair tie between her lips. She lets the thin blonde strands of her hair fall back to her shoulders. "She didn't stay the night?" 

"That would've been kind of sick," Jeff says. 

"He could barely walk," Jamison agrees. "Okay, I'm lying. You were fine." 

"I figured she'd have to stay, the way you were begging her. Ditch Wilson, baby, he doesn't know you like I know you. We can make it work, just say you'll stop seeing him." 

Eddie drops a plate in the sink with a splintering crush. The answering roar of laughter tells him what he hadn't had breath to ask. No, he didn't really say any of that shit. 

"You were drunk, not stupid," Jeff says.

"Not that stupid," Jamison corrects. 

Eddie frowns down at the broken plate in the sink for a breather. Nerves abated, total loserdom escaped for another day, he holds his damp hand up in the air.  "Any of you fuckers seeing this?" 

"Get a new tattoo?" Macy asks. 

He shakes his hand, the string (still caught in his sleeve, line like a bright vein up his arm) shaking. "You don't see it?"

"Your artist is gonna be pissed, they hate cheaters." 

Eddie sighs. "Can someone pass me the trash can?" 

They clean the house together in fits and starts, all nauseous, all wishing they'd had the sense to have a chill get together, just the five of them. Gareth declares his home a no go scene for the rest of summer and Eddie doesn't bother offering, nobody wants a party at the trailer park. Seeing the disco ball missing a rainbow lense under the stairs, a jumbo box of popcorn sprayed over the entire downstairs bathroom, and poor Manny Gomez cup-locked where he snoozes on the Persian rug in the lounge, Eddie wouldn't agree to host a party ever, even if he lived in one of the rich kid cribs like Harrington. It takes hours to put it right.

The longer he cleans the looser the string becomes. It drops to the floor (seemingly done with no regard to the laws of physics, having magicked itself out of his sleeve at a point, unnoticed) and trips him up as he walks downstairs. Eddie led a one man search party for Gareth's pet fish who some idiot transferred to the bathtub. The fish flops around at the turbulence of his trip inside of a temporary cup, but Eddie manages to return the poor thing to its tank uninjured.  

"It's fucking sick," he says, crouching down to follow the fish as it reacclimates. Its big black eyes are like sequins set in orange glitter, scales glistening, a shimmering of purple and teal blues kissing its underbelly as it swims. "You're a beautiful creature. I'm sorry somebody tried to evict you, babe." 

"He's a boy." 

"Yeah, and he's a babe." Eddie bites his tongue. 

You bend at the waist. With the shades still drawn, the brunt of the light entering the room is from your left, and the right side, the side closest to Eddie, is lit blue by the fish tank. You smile gently at the goldfish puttering around between artificial seaweed, an expression that grabs Eddie by the intestines. You feel his gaze, turning your face ever so slightly to his. 

"Don't look as nice without makeup, I know," you murmur. 

You're dressed differently today, stripped back in one way and more beautiful all the others, bare-skinned, no makeup or glitters to hide behind. Eddie remembers every detail of what you were wearing last night, the details stamped into his temporal lobe (before he drank his weight in other peoples booze). Black tights that shimmered slick oil as you moved and a tiny dress to boot. You're not a small girl, thighs there and grabbable and so un-grabbed, and when you bent down Eddie's shamefaced to say he followed the line. He loved how you looked last night, loves how you express yourself, but he craves how you are now, the lesser seen side of the same coin.

"You look nice." He cringes, his reflection in the fish tank glass a horror. Eddie never actually managed to shower this morning. If he doesn't smell like pale ale it'll be a miracle. "You do. At least one of us showered." 

"I'm surprised you're alive," you say with a fond smile. Eddie never takes your insults to heart because you never say them to hurt. You're easygoing. You're light incarnate. "I haven't seen you drink that much since graduation." 

"Macy says you took me home." He stands at full height. You follow suit. 

"Kicking and screaming. You told me you were going to drink every drop of Mr. Lashlee's bourbon or die trying, and you tried." 

"I didn't hurt you, did I?" he asks. He can be volatile when he's intoxicated, like a fish out of water. 

You gesture to his cheek. "Hurt yourself. You were freaking out and your hand kicked back. I didn't think it would bruise. Does it hurt awful?" 

Your sympathy melts him. Eddie shakes his head, lying through his teeth, "I can barely feel it." 

Your hoodie drowns you, your jeans not as oversized but hiding the feats of your thighs from view. He can't say he's not disappointed, though it's cute on you, your jeans rolled at the ends to showcase mildly mismatched crew socks and a pair of converse, their rubber shiny with newness besides a small sharpie heart on the left toe. Trapped beneath them is Eddie's string. 

He tugs it out. You show no sign of feeling it as the string snaps upward like an elastic and stops short. It goes stiff as a stick, tied from the knuckle of his marriage finger and leading…

To the knuckle of yours. 

Like matching rings.

Eddie thinks, Sure. If I'm delusional, of course it's something to do with you. 

"Don't suppose you can see it?" he asks, pulling against the string. The red band expands to accommodate you, rather than tug you inward. It has a mind of its own, apparently, listening to Eddie only on occasion. 

"The bruise?" you ask, confused. "It's hard not to see. But it's not too bad. You could buy some powder for it if it bothers you, but I think it makes you seem cool." 

"I don't seem cool?" 

You smile as though you're sharing a joke. If you are, Eddie hasn't heard it before. 

It's weird, crushing on someone. He can't remember feeling this way growing up, spending sun-soaked days at playgrounds and parking lots and the pool, wet to the knees, you and your friends sitting under the shade of the umbrellas. The first time he saw you there, in your bikini bottoms and your big white t-shirt bent over a book, he didn't feel any sudden revelation. No spark. No pulled string. He thought you were pretty without bragging about it and he met you not long after that at a nondescript barbecue. Then he stopped hanging out with his middle school friends and flunked two years. He forgot you existed. And now he knows you again, he feels more and more of himself bending and twisting trying to be what you want him to be, or what he thinks you want, at least. If you want Wilson, he can be Wilson. Eddie can kiss like a fish and wear too much cologne, he can sell out and cut his hair to the ears. 

Well, maybe not that far. I still want to be me, he thinks, eyes on your hands and the string stretched between them. The red seems darker now, onyx hued, ropey as blood. 

"What are you doing here?" Eddie forces out. Not surprised, you and Macy are close enough that you've formed friendships with the whole gang of merry misfits, but wondering if his string has pulled you here. Does he have any say? 

"I thought I'd help with the aftermath, see if anybody wanted to get burgers, the works." 

Eddie catches a flicker of nervousness in your stance, the half-step backwards you take when his shoe nears your own. The string loosens.

He doesn't have any intention of making you uncomfortable. He probably smells like a dumpster, he wouldn't blame you for needing space. And if who you were kissing last night is indicative of who you'll be sidling up to again in the future, Eddie has low hopes for you both. 

"Burgers?" Manny groans from the floor. 

You turn slowly on one heel. "Hello, Manny," you say, angling your head to line up with his. "Someone's drawn on you." 

"What did they draw?" Manny asks, rubbing his smeared face sluggishly. 

You look to Eddie for guidance. The reality of Manny's tagging is embarrassing. 

"It's a dick, I'm afraid." Eddie offers Manny a hand. "With disproportionate, uh, baubles." 

"But I'm sure Benny won't care," you say.

—

Benny makes Manny wear a baseball cap pulled down low, because This is a family establishment, Man. Every time you see the thick-lined drawing on his cheek you smile and feel awful for it, but luckily Manny seems to be taking the joke well. 

If you'd fallen asleep at the party last night and woke up with a semi-permanent tattoo of similar calibre you'd be too mortified to bother leaving the house until it was gone. You're not thrilled with your appearance as it is. Any cruel additions would have you housebound. 

Guilty, you take a bite of your burger to hide your smile. Eddie's already clocked it, generous enough to pretend he hasn't noticed, and Macy finds it funnier than you do, so she's yet to notice your amusement. The rest of the boys are making ornaments out of plastic straws. Gareth is shit, Jamison better, but Jeff takes the cake with a three layer birthday cake, candles included. It strains to break as he adds another candle. His bloodshot eyes show no signs of anxiety. 

Manny grabs a napkin and knocks your ice tea. The cup sloshes but doesn't spill, ice cubes clinking and beads of condensation racing down the sides of your glass. You pick it up to feel the cold. Lately you've been morose. The cold, any sensation, can put distance between you and the heavy for a while, but there's no cure. And now you've gone and let Cory Wilson of all people kiss you for the simple fact that he wanted to. 

He's the first person who's ever wanted to kiss you. 

But you don't want him to kiss you again, and you're not sure how you manage it. Do you have to tell him you're not interested? Probably not, it was just a stupid kiss. He dipped down, his lips hot, his smell nice if overpowering, and it was right for a while, it was what you wanted, but then his hand dropped down rather than up, searching for something to take rather than something to hold. 

It's not how you pictured it. 

"You okay?" 

You raise your eyes, ice tea in hand. Eddie splits his attention between you and a basket of crispy crinkle cut fries loaded with cheese and bacon bits. He's nonchalant, his shoe tapping into yours as he leans forward for another bite. He chews, and he waits for you to answer. 

"I'm alright. Thinking about work." Bad lie. "Gareth said you got a new tattoo?" 

"Nope. I've been thinking about getting a new one to fill the gap under my puppeteer," he says, extending his arm to show you it in the light, the ridge and weave of his veins stark against his white skin. They're especially fierce leading down to his wrist, as is the small notch on the outermost side. You reach out to touch it without thinking, fingertip rubbing carefully over the bump. 

Eddie pushes his arm closer. "I want something here." He draws a half circle with his opposite pinky in the empty space. "But I can't think of what I want. Sometimes you go to the shop and they have a bunch of flash sheets and you like one of them enough to get it, right? I don't know."

It means a lot to you that he'd let you touch him without asking. You should've asked. 

He should've asked you, but he was drunk. You're not sure he was thinking straight. 

You sit back in your seat and finish your iced tea, feeling the cold slide down into your chest. You shiver at the feeling. 

"Are you sure you're okay?" Eddie asks. 

"Why wouldn't she be okay, Munson?" Manny asks. 

"Quiet, dickhead." 

Manny snorts, grabbing a greedy handful of Eddie's fries as punishment for a low blow. Eddie couldn't care less, clearly, his focus on you and your moping. You step into a sweeter smiling version of yourself that you save for times like this. 

"You know I work for Deenie DIY?" you ask. 

"Of course I know that," Eddie says, and not in the way people do sometimes where they assume you're insulting their intelligence, but the nice way. Like knowing where you work is easy information to carry.

He's the nicest of his friends, which is a credit to him; they aren't a bad bunch.

"So, I have this coworker that keeps bringing soup to work, and she swears that someone is syphoning off a couple of spoonfuls before lunch every day…" 

Eddie listens to your story with a weird expression. You bumble through the twists and turns of the world's stupidest fable, how she blamed a bunch of different people and now no one likes her, and the soup was getting warmed up by the fridge lights —it was her own fault. He listens, he smiles and nods and offers commentary that's funnier than the original story, the entire time with a downturn to his lips. You hate seeing him like that, but you don't know what to say. 

Plates left streaked with ketchup and mayo, glasses dotted by greasy prints and lip smackers, you and your friends tip as generously as twenty-somethings can afford and decide to head back to Gareth's for a couple of hours. It's barely past noon on a Saturday in late July. Nobody has to work for at least thirty six hours. You pile into two cars, arguing about what tape to play for the ten minute drive. Eddie ends up in the seat beside you somehow, and he doesn't shy away when the car takes a bend and you lean into his side. 

He puts his arm behind your shoulder. "Sorry," he says.

"It's okay." 

You lift your head. The memory of his face hovering close to yours, the sweet smell of cheap cherry wine on his breath, his hand clumsy with drink but kind as it climbed your back, your dress thin enough to catch your death, thin enough to feel like he was touching bare skin. Sorry, he'd said, you're just so fucking beautiful. 

"I gotta take my uncle's car back. Wouldn't do me a solid and come with?" he asks. 

— 

You follow Eddie in the van. He can see you in his rear view mirror, your hands on his steering wheel, the window down and the breeze ruffling your hood. 

Jeff was too high to drive and Eddie wouldn't trust Jamison to drive a moped. Gareth can't drive and okay, Macy can, she's good, but Eddie chose you for a reason. The string tied between your hands clings from door to door. 

Eddie pulls the sierra into the driveway in front of the trailer, holding two fingers up to you as he hops out and jogs up the steps. Two minutes.

"Wayne? Brought the car back." 

"How's your bruise, Eds?" 

Wayne's laying on the couch with a blanket over his legs, coffee cup swapped for a plate of cookies and a bag of chips. Eddie leans on the doorway, Wayne's keys on his finger. The string bobs back through the door, as if to say, Hey, she's over here, dipshit.

"It's fine, what are you eating? Did you have breakfast after I went?" 

"Yeah I had breakfast, I'm a grown man." Punctuated by the crunch of potato chips. "It's lunch time. This is my lunch." 

"Let me make you a pot pie or something." 

Wayne waves him off. "You're going back out. Who's in the van?" 

"That's Y/N." 

Wayne smiles knowingly. "Ah, is it?" He stands up with remarkable speed putting his plate of cookies on the table. He ducks down to peek through the window, and you must see him or wave, Wayne waving back. "Make her come say hi." 

"I won't be making her say shit." 

"She was nice last night." 

Eddie cringes, having forgotten you were his saviour. "Do I wanna know what you said?" 

"I said you were an idiot and an embarrassment, and that your safe return deserved a reward. You should invite her over for dinner." 

"No, because that's, like, a couples thing. Come and meet my parents," Eddie says, shoulders jumping, hands up in jazz hands, "laugh at my baby photos." 

"I don't have many of those. Got a bunch of you when you were fourteen and deep in the glam rock obsession." 

He used to say Eddie could wear whatever he wanted and paint his face a hundred different colours as long as Wayne got to take a picture. 

"Great, I'll invite her, and you can show her your nice album of reasons not to date me." 

"Son, why don't you just ask her to dinner? Worked in my day." 

"You're not even old. And I was going to," Eddie whines, rubbing the flat of his forehead ineffectually. "Then she was kissing this idiot Cory Wilson last night. I blew it. Lost my chance."

"I still think you should ask her for dinner. Any sense about her and she'll say yes." 

It's one of those reassurances your mom says to you when you're down on your luck. Handsomest guy in the world, how could anybody say no to that face? 

"Maybe I'll ask her." Eddie smiles nervously. "We're gonna go hang out, cool? You going to Dean's?" 

"None of your business. Yeah, I'm going to Dean's, just to help him fix his hand saw. I'll be back before six. See you then?" 

Eddie tosses Wayne the sierra keys. "See you. Don't drink too much." 

"Ironic, Edward!" 

Eddie leaves the trailer feeling vaguely hopeful about you; maybe Wayne's right. Kissing somebody doesn't mean you're married, but the window of opportunity to let his feelings be known is getting smaller the longer he waits. And seeing you standing against the grate of the van with your hands in your pockets, slice of your calves peeking out between your socks and jeans, big sleeves on your hoodie falling up one arm, he doesn't know if he can wait anymore. 

"Hey, would you wanna get out of here?" he asks. "Like, ditch Gareth's for a bit?"

"And do what?" 

The string shortens as he closes the gap between you. He twists it around his finger. It's tied to you —it must be a sign. (Or he's imagining it and he has, like, a paralytic brain worm eating its way across his eyeballs.) 

"I don't know, hit the goodwill? I have somewhere between twelve and sixteen dollars with your name on it if you're interested." He tries not to shrug, can't help it. "Only if you want." 

"Yeah. I want to." You worry your lip. "I'm not dressed to go out." 

"Are you kidding? You look fine. You look good." 

You rub your wrists together, grimacing. 

Eddie can roll with the punches. "Or you could go home and change first?"

"Would that be okay?" 

Eddie's glad for offering to witness the spectacle of your bedroom. The string seems to hate him but love you, giving you space all the way here and yanking him like a bad dog when he strays too far. You change behind your closet door and it forms hearts at your feet, unperturbed by the mountain of rejected shirts and skirts. 

Eddie lounges in a bean bag by the door, taking in your belongings as he waits. You've crafts on your desk, little origami cranes made of paper you've painted with watercolour. Phthalo blue and alizarin crimson foiled with short, skinny strokes of gold etching. Intricate and simple, time and care poured into each sheet. 

"Are you sure I'm okay by here?" Eddie asks. 

"Can you see me?" 

"No." Eddie can see shelves of books with creased spines, your made bed and all your mismatched sheets, the candles on your window sill —moonlight meadow, half-burned and sun-bleached; candied sweetheart, untouched; white lily and freesia, a double wick with only one melted tunnel—, and the soot stain unfurling like a soft-edged flower around the curtain pole. "Can't see anything." 

"Then don't worry." 

The sun ticks higher into the sky as an hour stretches into a second since you left Gareth's together. Eddie likes his room, his dense kingdom of the stuff that make him him, but he likes yours for the quiet. He can picture you sitting cross legged on your bed with a book in your lap, your back arched uncomfortably forward, a day old drink of water on the ceramic coaster with tiny bubbles clinging to the sides of the glass. He thinks he'd like that, to sit here and watch you, listening to one of your CDs, the string between you bouncing with each turn of a page. 

Eddie pulls on the string experimentally. Determined to fuck with him, it becomes a tauter thread, and the momentum of his tug tips you over. Your hand follows the line and the sudden slip pulls you into view without a shirt. Eddie flinches and looks as far away from you as he can. 

You laugh to yourself, but the sound is bitter, like burning coffee grounds on the tongue. 

"Is everything good with you?"  

You and Eddie are friends. Not great ones, but enough to have been able to ask you to ditch the others. There have been hundreds of seconds alone, the two of you sitting together at tables edged by arcade machines, diner booths, bowling alley benches, waiting for the others to get back, and those are moments where Eddie found time to fall in love with you. The string must be a manifestation or those seconds, threads of time tied together that join you forever, even if you can't see them. They're there. Eddie cares about you and it makes his throat hurt to hear your unhappy sounds; you have a morosity to you that he isn't heartless enough to ignore. He doesn't want to. 

Everybody has an unseen misery weighing them down. Eddie needs to find a way to hold yours for you. Just for a bit, however long you need. 

Unless Cory Wilson is going to take that mantle. Maybe that's why you're sighing; Eddie would be pretty upset if he had to remember being kissed by Wilson. He was already upset about it, and Wilson didn't kiss him. 

"Hey," Eddie says, peering between his fingers. With you definitely out of sight, he lifts his head. "Seriously, are you good?" 

"I don't know what to wear, that's all. Sorry for taking so long." 

"We could sit here till tomorrow and that would be cool. We don't even have to go, but you don't have to stress about what you're wearing. It's goodwill." 

"I always get stressed about what I'm wearing." 

"Is that a girl thing?" 

You toss a pretty flowered dress over the closet door. It slinks under its own weight and puddles on the floor. "I've always been like this, I get too focused on looking nice, it winds me up." 

"You always look nice." 

Your laugh says you certainly don't believe him. "Thanks, Eddie." 

"I'm not just saying it to make you feel better. You'd look nice in a potato sack." 

"Like Marilyn Monroe." 

"Who?" 

You appear in a sliver, naked arm linked to an unseen but unignorable naked chest, your face over your shoulder and a beatific silkiness to your smile. "You know who she is. Happy Birthday mister president? Blonde, with her beauty mark." You tap your top lip with your pinky. 

"Oh, right. Did she wear sacks often?" 

"Someone said she was beautiful because her clothes were designer and made to fit, so she did a photoshoot in a potato sack to prove she was beautiful." 

"You could totally do that." 

"It's not other people I need to convince." You retreat behind your closet door again, your voice half as clear as you confess, "I think… I've always been like this. I look in the mirror and I don't even know who I'm seeing. She doesn't feel like me." 

Eddie's ridiculous sitting on a beanbag while you bare your heart. He swears in his head and climbs onto tired legs, his hangover beating like a dull knife between his eyes for a moment while he gets used to standing. 

You take his silence for something else. "Sorry, ignore me. It's weird." 

"That's not weird. It's not." He tries to say what he means and not the first words that come into his head. "You know, I used to feel that way. Growing up, in junior high, I felt like such a poser. Even when I started being myself, I didn't feel authentic. Does that… is that similar?" 

"I guess so. How did you make it stop?" 

"Okay, this is gonna sound bad, but my mom died." Eddie twists a ring around his knuckle, the string tangling between fingers. "And I didn't care for a while. And then I got older." 

"I'm sorry," you murmur. 

"It's okay. I didn't say it for sympathy. That's just what happened." Eddie sits gingerly on the end of your bed. He doesn't want to intimidate you —after all, you're a young woman alone with him in a state of undress. A vulnerable young woman, if you're as upset as you're beginning to sound. "I'm trying to make you feel better with the worst personal anecdote ever." 

"You don't have to make me feel better. I shouldn't have brought it up, I don't…" 

"You can tell me anything," he says. 

You appear again, this time fully clothed. Black skirt to your knees —the sickest skirt you've ever worn— and a thin gauzy camisole, you look beautiful, and insanely uncomfortable. "Really?" you ask, hands wringing.

"I wouldn't say it if I didn't mean it. I promise." 

"Well. Last night," —Eddie sees flashing lights, the carbon bubbles in a spilled beer— "I let somebody kiss me."

He knows. It's agony. Eddie waits for you to continue with an open expression despite the feeling your confession inspires; he assumes this is what a knife to the eye feels like, the willing horror of letting you use it. 

"Nobody's ever wanted to kiss me before, so I let him. And I'm shit scared that I'm never gonna recognise myself in the mirror, so I'll keep letting him kiss me." You wring your hands meanly. "Sorry, I know I sound like a bad movie. Why is talking about your feelings this awkward?" 

"That was your first kiss, last night?" 

It's not the right question. You wince visibly. "I know, I'm in my twenties, it's embarrassing." 

"No, that's–" Eddie sighs. "That's not what I meant." What did he mean? Fuck, I wish it could've been me, and Jesus, that doesn't make a lick of fucking sense. You aren't right, for starters, Cory Wilson isn't the first person who's ever wanted to kiss you, he's just the bastard that got lucky enough to have you reciprocate. "Wait, was it okay? Did he corner you?" 

You sit on the end of the bed with a small smile. "No. He didn't pressure me." 

"Was it what you wanted?" 

"Not really… I guess I don't know what I want." 

Is that rejection, or is he self-absorbed? Should he take the hint, or is he just another guy making it about himself? Eddie leans back into your bed to escape the heartbreak of being close to you, the string anchoring his hand in place as he tries to scratch his chest. 

"It's not embarrassing to get your first kiss in your twenties," he says, eyes roving over the lines of a small paper butterfly, black cardstock like ink against your white ceiling. "That's what your twenties are for." 

"Don't bother, I know exactly how you lost your virginity." 

Eddie scrunches his eyes shut, can't stop himself from smiling as his wry voice scratches out, "Listen, everyone knows how I lost my virginity, but that's not the point." 

"You'd think a seventeen year old would make marginally better decisions." You're teasing, not shaming, your smile playful. 

"No, you wouldn't. Seventeen year olds are stupid. I thought I knew what I wanted at seventeen and now I'm twenty three and the only thing I know for sure is that I don't know a thing. The point of being twenty is doing shit for the first time. It's our first time being grown ups." 

"That's wise," you say. 

"Fuck off." 

You lay down beside him. The string whips like a ribbon in the wind before falling into the shape of a heart again, clearly pleased to have you near. 

"It's not embarrassing," Eddie says quietly. "But when you get your second kiss, I think you should save it for someone you want to kiss. Don't just let someone have it because you're not sure of yourself." 

"That's a nice sentiment, Eddie, but I already gave it away." 

He swallows his surprise, a tiny spike of agony. "How was that one?" 

"I'm not sure about it. I don't think it counted." 

"Do I wanna know?" 

"I'm not sure about that, either." 

"Was it Wilson?" he asks. 

You turn your cheek into the bedsheets. He can hear the fabric brushing your skin, turns ever so slightly to meet you, a few inches all it would take to breathe the same air. 

"Eddie," you say, very, very softly. 

His heart eases into his mouth a beat at a time until it's thrumming between his ears. 

"Yeah?" he asks, his tone a twin. 

"I think I need to cancel our plans." 

It's not what he's expecting you to say. 

—

There's a black velvet jacket dotted with embroidered stars hidden under your bed, their silver thread like cosmic dust. Music pounds the floor and shakes the house's foundations, seeping down into Macy's damp basement one rippling riff at a time, the bass of it deep in Eddie's chest, but he can't stop thinking about your jacket. Did you know it was there? 

The string tied to his marriage finger grows restless the longer you and Eddie are apart, bouncing like a shockwave whenever he thinks your name. In fact, all it takes is the idea of you, the slightest memory of your smile, your hands, the way you tell stories to the group with your shoulders turned to him like he's there alone, and the string flinches. 

"Are you okay?" Manny asks. 

Eddie drags his way up the couch. "Hey, Man. You got the dick off your face. That's great." 

Manny lifts his cheek. "Had to steal some of my mom's make-up. Can't tell, huh?" 

The colour match is dubious, now he's mentioned it. Eddie doesn't have the heart to tell him, flopping back into the crisp, cracked leather seat beneath him. A circle of his face is sticky where it clings to the couch. It's among the worst feelings of this earthly plane, grim as ice cream dripping down your hand on a hot day, or perpetually gutting heartbreak like he suffers now. 

"I think I'm seeing things," Eddie says. 

"Jeff has stuff for that." 

Eddie groans loudly. With the way he feels it's not melodrama. Just pure human anguish. He groans again when nothing changes, fisting his hair in two aching hands. He's clenched and unclenched his hands for hours all day, trying to force the hurt away from his chest, chasing breathlessness to the tips of his fingers. Pins burn his palms. 

He knew in the back of his mind that you weren't going to want to date him. Realistically you have options, even if you think you don't, and his being your only option wouldn't inspire romance anyways. Being someone's last resort isn't love. None of it was love, you aren't in love, but Eddie thinks he could've been. He was halfway there, falling, whatever the poets might say —Eddie wants you. Wants to do stupid shit with you. He can picture the scene like he has before, that first bouquet of flowers, lilies with big white petals and purple sunspots. The cellophane would crinkle in trembling hands pressed to his chest, their stems leaking dew into his hardly worn button up. He'd pass them to you with more confidence than he feels and tell you that you're pretty. You're always pretty. 

He's not pretty, he's barely funny. He was stupid for thinking you'd like him too. 

The string is pale pink. Eddie loops it around his finger thoughtlessly, worsening the sting of pins and needles. 

There were times… 

He clutches his chest. The nausea he's feeling can't be understated.

There were times when you could've been in love with him, he thinks. Splitting a cigarette you had no business splitting on the steps of Jeff's porch, your vanilla chapstick softening the filter. Holding his hand for support as you made the hike down to the lake, your fingers curled around his like you worried you might hurt him. In the passenger seat of his van on the way to your house, laughing as he sang along to a Van Halen guitar solo. You could've been in love with him. 

But Eddie didn't ask you out. He didn't do what Wayne said, because goodwill is not dinner, and now you're probably happily sequestered in Wilson's BMW. He jumped the wrong gun and he blew it. 

"Seriously, Munson, are you good?" 

"Peachy." Eddie holds up the sign of the horns, pinky and index finger up, thumb holding his marriage and middle finger down, face buried in an old cushion. 

"Let me go get you a joint." 

"I gave it up." 

"Dude. Pizza it is." 

Eddie waits for Manny to leave before he turns onto his back. Last night in the shower after a knowing shoulder squeeze from his Uncle and a frankly overflowing bowl of microwave spaghetti, he pressed his forehead to the tile and let it all ache. He might have cried or water may have streamed from his hair, he genuinely doesn't know, but he knows he's in danger of another round of the same if he keeps thinking about you. 

He's a big boy. He can cope with your decision. 

"Eddie, what are you doing?" 

Eddie sits up with a handful of clicks. "Robin?" 

"Hey," Robin says, "whaddya know, I followed the smell of sadness and rejection and here you are." 

She's dressed fancy, her hair in a rare updo, faux pearls dangling from her ears to kiss the collar of a leather jacket. "Shit, you're so cool, Buckley." 

"Thanks. You okay?" Robin asks, sitting on the arm of the couch. 

Eddie's stomach churns as her perfume reaches him, the sweet, subtle smell of vanilla under white musk. He leans his face against the starched denim of her jeans. "Who told you?" he mumbles.

"Steve. Who else?" Robin pats his head. "But Jeff told him. And I was talking about your bruise." 

Eddie waves off her concern. "Where is Steve in my hour of need?" 

"Smoking a not secret cigarette with Jeff," she says, a melodic cadence to her usual light rasp. 

"I wouldn't risk Jeff's cigarettes." 

She snorts a laugh, "Steve would risk his life for a cigarette. He loves to say that quitting was easy, but he drinks half a beer and starts gasping like a fish." Robin mimes Steve's apparent desperation, to Eddie's delight.

She smiles as his laughter peters out, tilting her head to the side. "So… was it bad?" 

"I don't know." He rubs his eyes. "The last time I got rejected was in senior year, and it was– I didn't even like her, you know, thought she was pretty, but this is different." 

"Sorry, Eddie," she says, pushing her bottom lip up into her top one, a bubbled pout that betrays how out of her depth she feels. 

Eddie isn't trying to make it awkward. "That's okay. I liked her, she doesn't like me, it's cool." The string flails. The music from upstairs gets louder. "What the fuck is happening? I thought Macy said it was a quiet one." 

Robin and Eddie start up the basement stairs to the main body of the house. The air is warmer and thicker, the faint smell of hotdogs and burgers grilling in the backyard filtering inside through the patio doors. "You know," Eddie says, glaring at the sudden crowd, "there's an atari down there." 

"Sorry, I think I'll have to keep my idiot out of trouble." Robin points at Steve near the stereo with Jeff, the two of them laughing hard enough to bruise as they mess with the pitch of the music. "Steve! You'll go deaf in your good ear if you don't stop!" 

"What?" Steve shouts. 

Robin rushes over to drag him away from the stereo. Eddie doesn't want to be your best friend, but if it was a friendship like Steve and Robin's he would consider himself lucky to have it, smiling as she wraps her arms around his chest from behind and pulls him away, sniffing at him, her nose wrinkled as she gives a reprimand too low for Eddie to catch. "I'm serious," she says as they grow closer, weaving around the living room coffee table and retreating back into the slim hallway leading to the basement stairs, "where are your earplugs?" 

"In the car, Rob. I'm fine, I promise." 

"Sure. Alright, Eddie, would you keep him away from the stereo?" Robin shoves Steve toward him. "Thanks so much." 

"I'm not high," Steve says as soon as she's gone. 

"While that's uber convincing, honeybear, I don't care if you are," Eddie says lightly. "Not a cop. Wanna go get a burger?" 

They move away from the living room and into the kitchen, where Steve nearly trips over the door jam and Eddie forgets for the first time in days how awful he feels. 

He sits Steve down at the glass table next to Macy herself and a younger friend of Manny's. Jamison and Gareth stand at the grill arguing about who's doing what, but Jamison proves to be the better grillmaster and the better friend, dropping two burgers on paper plates in front of them not more than twenty seconds after they've sat down. "For you, my poor little Munson," he says, smacking the ketchup and mayonnaise down between them. "Eat up." 

"I can't get the cap off," Steve complains, welding a bottle of mayonnaise at him like a dagger. 

Eddie sighs. Steve is definitely high. "You know Jeff doesn't smoke plain rolled cigarettes, right? Like, you knew it was weed?" 

"Whaaaat?" Steve asks exaggeratedly. "Open my mayonnaise." 

"Plausible deniability," Eddie says. "I like it." 

He finds that taking care of Steve is a good distraction, but there's only so much care a grown man needs, high or not, and Eddie's gaze is pulled to the string. It's impossible to stop thinking about you on the other end of it. He tries not to look at the string at all, but he can't, being as permanently tied to his finger as it is. What's worse is seeing people tread on it. The colour fades slowly, once a strong red, now a meek pink. At this rate it'll be bone white by the end of the night, like a vein with no supply. Maybe that's how this ends. You stay kissing Cory Wilson and the string dies. 

As he thinks it, the string tightens. The pink turns rosy, turns healthy, red as a rose, vice-like on his finger. Eddie knows without knowing that you're near. He could've guessed without the string's shifting, your presence the antonym of sixth-sense chills. He turns back toward the house and catches a glimpse of you as you walk past the patio door in your black velvet jacket, those tiny sparse stars like needlepoints from this far away and glinting as you turn to let Robin pass. 

"Holy fuck!" Robin mouths, Steve's earplugs in a small pouch meant for coins in hand as she speed walks down the short path to the table. "She's here!" 

"I can see that." 

Robin sits on the chair next to Steve's. He passes her the last half of his burger and takes the earplugs from an outstretched hand, shaking them from their pouch. You'd never look at him like this with mayonnaise on his top lip, thigh to thigh with loser-sweetheart Robin Buckley, and think he'd be violent. He isn't, truly, his hearing loss the result of getting his ass handed to him hard, and the motivation of a pacifist who wears ear defenders to the movies. 

"You're gonna have to speak up," Steve says, pushing the plugs in. 

"Yeah, man." He doesn't have much to say anyhow. His stomach is curled in knots, the string a tightrope without walkers between him and you in the kitchen. You're talking to someone, walking one way before rushing the other. "What the fuck?" Eddie asks, sitting up. 

Macy stands as somebody gasps. Eddie's quick to follow, Gareth jumping back out of Jamison's reach as the grillmaster swings a long pronged fork his way. "What?" he asks cluelessly. 

Eddie follows the string to you, stepping over the patio doorjam and into the cacophony of the kitchen. Blaring rock music vibrates through Eddie's worn shoes, but it doesn't occlude the vehemence of Cory Wilson's slurring. "I should've known," he hisses. 

Eddie would stand in front of you, he should, he's going to, but he doesn't and he can't fathom why. He's glued to the spot as you defend, "I didn't know. And I didn't do it on purpose." 

"Are you fucking with me?" 

"No." You sound startled rather than scared, but the cagey way you've moved back and the curl of your hands into fists says otherwise. "No, I didn't kiss you to–" 

"To what? Guess it doesn't make a difference. I should've known. Two guys in one night's a good night for a girl like you, huh?" 

You flinch away. It could be the pull of the string or the panic on your lips as you struggle to speak, or maybe Eddie's done being a coward who half-asses his life even if you're not gonna kiss him like he wishes you would, whatever it is, it has him standing in front of you unafraid. 

Cory Wilson is rough. Eyes bloodshot, evil on tequila sliders from the sugary brown stain on his collar, he takes one look at Eddie and starts laughing. 

"What the fuck is that supposed to mean, a girl like her? Why don't you explain it?" Eddie asks, his voice burnt, almost acrid in his own mouth. "What, you plant one on her and you think it's alright to talk to her like that?" 

"Eddie," you say. 

He reaches back gently, his fingertips brushing your abdomen. 

"You're a fucking classless act, Wilson, you always have been. You don't talk to her like that." 

"Why don't you stay out of it, freak?" 

"Dude," Jamison says. "No way. Get the fuck out of here." 

"You can't stay out of it, can you? It makes sense now I'm seeing it," Cory rails. 

This is so teenaged angst and Eddie's over it. You'll have to forgive him but he's feeling territorial. This is Macy's house, they're your friends, and Cory was a dick before he kissed you. "This is embarrassing, dude," Eddie says over the island, meeting Cory's eyes straight on. "Don't do this shit." 

"It was you, right?" Cory asks, nodding, mind made up already. He peers around Eddie's shoulder to stare at you incredulously. "Him?" 

"It doesn't matter!" you insist, stepping forward. "Why does it matter? I said no, I don't wanna go home with you, I'm sorry, I told you more than you needed to know because I thought it would help you get it, and I'm sorry I let you kiss me! I'm sorry, I thought it was best to be honest with you." 

Eddie's thinking you don't have to say sorry for anything. Cory's thinking about the milling crowd of young adults haunting the corners of the kitchen and pressed in from the hallway, rounding the island with his chest puffed up. 

"It was Munson, wasn't it?" 

You take a step back into Eddie. "It's fine," he says to you quickly, because coward or not he'd never let someone hit you, but you're pushing him behind you. You're protecting him. 

"Yes, it was Eddie!" you say. "So what? It has nothing to do with you."  

Macy cuts in, all red hair and glare. "Okay, enough. Cory, you have to leave, man. You can't yell at girls in my kitchen because they don't want to sleep with you." 

Eddie stares at the back of your head. 

Did you kiss him? That second kiss, that was with him?

"You kissed me?" he asks quietly. 

Your lips part as you look at him from over your shoulder. Macy and Jamison argue with a red-faced Cory, Steve asks Robin what someone just said and Robin shouts the answer, but Eddie couldn't tell you what anyone's truly saying if you paid him to, his attention on the pillow of your bottom lip and searching upwards as you exhale. 

"Eddie, you kissed me." Your eyes are soft, the starts of your brows hooked together. "You really don't remember?" 

"I kissed you? When?" He grabs your arm, pulling you toward him. "At Gareth's place?" 

"I took you home," —you drop your chin, a new panic about you as your voice drops, waning, tenuous as spider silk— "you were wasted, you'd been drinking Macy's wine and Mr. Lashlee's bourbon and I didn't mean for it to happen. I wasn't trying to get you to kiss me, Eddie, I just asked why you were upset." 

"What did I say?" 

"You said that I was beautiful. That you wanted to kiss me, and then you did." 

Sorry, he'd said, you're just so fucking beautiful. 

"And then you freaked out like you'd been laced about string between your fingers. I took you to your room and told Wayne you ate a bunch of hotdogs on the turn." You won't meet his eyes. "I'm sorry. I never meant for it to go that far." 

A glass smashes. Eddie takes your hand, pulling you away from the scene and through a curious crowd to the back door. He closes the patio doors behind you and half jogs you down past the smoking barbecue and all its leftovers, chairs pulled out haphazard from the garden table and food discarded. 

He has to be quick, he doesn't know how much time he has before everyone comes flooding back out of the house.

You're strangely timid, shame having sewn your brows together. "Eddie, I'm sorry," you say, your hand wriggling weakly in his to be let go. He lets it fall.

"Sweetheart, stop. Just stop. I'm the one who's sorry… I think I–" He sighs, you're so fucking beautiful on loop in the back of his mind. "I remember. I know I made a move. You didn't do anything wrong." 

"I should've stepped away faster. I wasn't expecting you to kiss me." 

"I shouldn't have kissed you." 

"It was just a peck, Eddie. It's okay, 'cos it's not that I don't want you to kiss me ever, but you were drunk. I should have–" 

"You didn't do anything wrong," he insists, cutting you off before you can criminalise yourself with a vehement shake of the head. "But that's– that's–" He chokes on his question. "What did I say about the string?" 

"The string?" you ask, and fuck! Fuck, you look beautiful now, beautiful still as the night moves forward and the day's last lazy dregs of sunlight dapple your skin through the hanging branches of the surrounding sycamores. You stuff your hands in your pockets and pull your jacket around your tummy to hide from the cold, the string tugging with you. Your eyes are wide with confusion. "You wouldn't stop talking about it. That's when you hit yourself, your bruise?" 

"After I kissed you, or before?" 

"After, but… why does it…" 

"I'm going to sound crazy." 

You laugh softly. "No different than usual, then." 

Eddie opens his hand and holds it out for yours. The string on his finger is loose but not long, moreso when you give him your hand. "I know you can't see it, I get that it's ridiculous, but there's a string tied from my third finger to yours. This red piece of thread like my nanna would use. I woke up yesterday morning and it was there. I thought maybe I was going crazy, because I like you," —he swallows air, no idea why this is so hard— "and I saw you kissing that loser and I figured it was some quasi manifestation of how much I want to be near you, like torture, but it was after I kissed you. It appeared after I kissed you." 

"So we're connected by a string?" you ask slowly. 

Eddie's genuinely ecstatic that you'd even entertain it. "Yes!" 

"Show me," you say. 

"I can't." 

"Well, where is it?" 

The string is tight as a wire again. Eddie runs his finger along it, hoping that'll help. You can't see the string but you can see the ease with which he follows it, how his finger slides from one end to the other seamlessly. Inspired suddenly by the memory of your bedroom, Eddie grabs the string near the middle and pulls. 

The string deigns to do his bidding, yanking your hand forward. 

You pull it back instinctively. "Is that a trick?"  

"There's a string. I've been losing my mind trying to show people, I tried to cut it off. It's impenetrable." Eddie stamps down his excitement in the face of your less enthusiastic frown. "It runs from me to you." 

You rub your marriage finger, the string a strong and shimmering crimson at your touch. "I can't feel it, but you pulled me." Your eyes are shiny. "Eddie, you like me?"

"Yeah, I do." He can't believe he's admitted to it out loud. No escaping it. Of the two secrets he just told you, it's the least terrifying. He wants to say more and he wishes he could take it all back, your confusion tangible in the lines of your frown, your gloss-sticky lips drawn thinner. 

He's interrupted. 

"Hey, Y/N!" Macy calls, slipping through the doors, Robin on her heels. "You okay?" 

Eddie steps back from you guiltily. 

"I'm fine! I'm fine, Mace, I was trying to let him down easy and I kept saying the wrong thing." You drop your hand out of the air. "I'm sorry." 

"Hey, it's okay, I don't care. I don't want people yelling at you, that's all." She spies on Eddie out of the corner of her eye. 

"I'm not yelling at her," he defends. 

"Yeah? You should both come back inside, then. Have a drink. That's why you're here, right?" 

She smiles until Eddie realises, defeated, that she's not gonna leave you alone out here with him. That's fine, he's glad people are looking out for you, but fuck is it annoying. He's finally told you about the stupid impossible string that links you together and you almost believed him, he could see it, and worse, his confession lays at your feet unanswered. 

Macy pulls Eddie back by the t-shirt as you walk on ahead, where you're quickly commandeered by a concerned Harrington, a chocolate milkshake in his hand that he instantly attempts to share. "Eddie," Macy says, jaw dropped in emphasis, "you kissed?" 

He covers his eyes with his hands, palm out, solid rings digging into his eyelids. "Not really," he says, a pounding headache emerging between his eyes. "No. I guess not." 

—

Hawkins library smells musty with disuse. Dust motes swim between beams of light shining down through dirty windows, an aged yellow colour painting the pages of the book splayed in front of you. You'd originally retreated into Hawkins library in the pursuit of one thing alone: resolute, guaranteed solitude. You'd considered disconnecting your phone, but your address isn't a secret. The only sure fire way to be alone was to leave, and to hide. 

No twenty-two year old Hawkinite spends their Sunday mornings at the library. You'd carried a litre bottle of water and a tupperware of sandwiches into the recesses of the old building and dropped into a creaky desk bright and early. For a blessed, blissful half an hour, you set your cheek to cold wood and closed your eyes, content to be unreachable. 

It's not that you don't want to see people. Not that you don't want to see Eddie. You don't want to be seen. Not today. 

Some mornings you wake up and feel wrong. You can shower, dress in new clothes, wear makeup and nice shoes and pretty bangles, but none of it makes any difference to your poor self-esteem. You figured every woman feels this way —what is there to love in a world that advertises solutions to problems you didn't know you had until they printed it in magazines? But it's been getting worse. 

Now you're lonely enough to let acquaintances kiss you for the simple reason that they want to, and insecure enough to attribute that want to a specific motive, but Eddie said he kissed you because he thinks that you're beautiful. Because he likes you. Because a string runs from his hand to yours that can't be severed. 

The latter feels as mythological as the former. 

It's a mess. You've asked a thousand questions. Would the situation be cleaner if you rejected Cory? Did Eddie kiss you because he realised he could, that you'd let him do it? Cruel. Not his style, and mean to think of him, but a worry nonetheless. From there the questions broaden, immature in root. Does Eddie actually like you? Would he be your boyfriend? Does he want that, do you want that, is he okay? Was he high last night? Was he ill? 

You flick through tomes with sweat thumbprints pressed deep into the corners and sides, scanning mildly then feverishly for an answer. Love myths, old legends, everything the librarian can give you on fantastical sweethearts —soulmates.

Eddie thinks that there's a string tied from his finger to yours to torture him as a link to what he wants, but can't have. 

It doesn't make much sense. Eddie Munson could have you if he asked nicely enough. 

That might be the problem. He's never asked anything of you. Eddie's a giver, constantly, a thousand little gifts. Your hair is nice like that. Do you want to sit here? You'll get the next one, but he never lets you get the next one. 

His very best gift was small. Waiting for Gareth to bring the car around and hiding from the early summer rain under the Hideout's short veranda, you and Eddie sitting on a cold wall, his jacket underneath you as he insisted to stop you from catching a chill. You remember thinking he was pretty even with his hair in his eyes, his cheeks hollowed in concentration. He pulled his wallet from his pocket, offering a glimpse of a guitar pick tucked inside of the plastic photo window. "This is my best kept secret, okay? Don't go spreading it around," he'd said from the corner of his mouth, deft fingers folding the length of a receipt into a square. He tore the excess, leaving himself with an incredibly small scrap to start with. From there he made the paper crane swiftly, folding neat corners and twisting the snout, placing the finished craft on your stocking-clad knee. "Here." 

"How did you do that?" you asked, awed. 

He made you a square of your own, shuffled closer to you on the wall, the heat of his hands near yours to correct you and his patient demonstration booting your heart into overdrive. You remembered every step of his origami even weeks later, folds of paper brushed by the soft memory of his fingertips on the back of your hand, accidental touches, and the smell of him, so close. 

Those paper cranes in your room, tens of them sewn like popcorn strings at christmas… 

You shake the thought from your head and close the book. Maybe you do like Eddie. Maybe you have all along (tenuously, waiting to get let down, and thinking there wasn't a chance in hell he could ever like you back). And now he likes you back? 

This obsessive retrospection is bad for your head. Sighing, you stand from the desk you've monopolised and stretch your arms over your head, taking a breath to peer down at your fruitless investigation. The string is in his head. He punched himself pretty hard the night you took him home —he's reeling from the after effects of booze and a mild concussion, no doubt. His mind is playing tricks on him. As far as you're concerned, there's no string. (But your hand moved when he pulled. But you want it to be real.) 

You pull the books to your chest and ferry them back to the lonely shelf they came from toward the back of the aisles near the audiobook stand. 

Fuck, you think to yourself, kneeling by the mythology section to begin putting your books back in a vaguely organised manner. Your reading provided no answers, and you're starting to worry it's none of the scenarios you'd contemplated, but a mean-spirited joke. What would Eddie ever want with me? you think, neatening the edges of the books slowly. 

Realising you like him, his chaste kiss, the red string, it's a lot to take in. You aren't sure what you believe, but you'd love to believe Eddie, in both of his confessions. 

You're standing and dusting your knees when you see it, a small cloth bound book shoved between encyclopaedias on the shelf above. It's more like a personal notebook than a novel. You reach for it on a whim. The cover is selenite white, slightly coruscating in the light and broken only by the weighted lines of Chinese characters painted with the bristle of a squirrel mop brush. You trace the last of the characters mindlessly, the English translation beneath it reading, Chinese Folk Mythology. 

You open the book to the first page, blank; the second, the titular; and the third, contents. You flick through creation myths and cosmology, defeated before you've even begun. You really want Eddie to be telling the truth about this —if he is, it means he's telling the truth about liking you, puts real feelings behind his tipsy kiss. 

The first and last burst of colour stops you short. 

The red thread of fate. 

A red line furls from one corner of the page to the second page opposite, shot through phrases, your eyes catching fast on choice words. Invisible to the mortal eye. Marriage of two souls. Tangled, knotted, but never broken. Fate. 

You sit on your knees on the floor of the library, the pages spread flat under your hands and their minute trembling. 

— 

Eddie checks his hair in the rearview mirror again. "Loser," he says, looking himself straight in the eye. Then he smiles with teeth, kicks open the driver's side door, and drops out of the van with a crushed bouquet of flowers held to his chest. 

Today's been a nightmare. Between you (always you, his only thought of the growing mess he's made) and Wayne, he's been flayed. 

"Your room is a pigsty, Eds, I'm not happy," his uncle had said, glaring at him over the lip of his coffee mug. Garfield absent and replaced by genial Odie, Eddie still felt abjectly judged. 

"I've been busy!" Eddie defended, too worried to eat and instead working his way through five pieces of nicotine gum at once, his jaw aching with each magnanimous chew. 

"Yeah, busy turning down shifts and spending all your money on burgers and beer." 

"I'm way too old for this," he said through gum bubbles. 

"Exactly! Too old to need reminding. If we get bugs I'm kicking you out." 

Wayne would never kick Eddie out, but that wasn't the point. "Wayne, I'm having a crisis. Could you have, like, a modicum of compassion for me? Your only nephew? In his time of need?" He clutched his chest. "Christ, man." 

Wayne leaned backwards in his chair to fish the trash bags from a miscellaneous drawer. "This is compassion. Don't be gross." 

His room was chaos rather than gross, knick-knacks in their wrong places and two hampers worth of laundry piled behind the door. The whole time he cleaned, he debated if it was appropriate to call you, and when he finally bit the bullet and picked up the phone you didn't answer. That's fine, except he called Robin (who was predictably nursing a rumpled Harrington back to health but had enough wherewithal to ask for the hot gossip), Macy (who told him to leave you alone if he was causing trouble), Gareth (who laughed), and Shauna (fucking Shauna) in search of you, and nobody knew where you were.

It got to the point where he couldn't not check on you. Couldn't stay stuck in the narrative anymore of your will we won't we. It hurt his chest too much, a real anxiety with claws to match. He hit Bradley's for a bouquet but the flowers they had were wilted slim pickings, and then he raced to the bakery before he thought about it too much and left empty handed. 

Imagine buying a girl baked goods for her to reject you. Eddie in the rain with his paper bag of croissants and dying flowers. 

He couldn't find you through the phone, but he has a secret weapon: the string that leads from him to you tied tight to his finger, a compass without magnets. He followed it in the van to this secluded spot overlooking Hawkins town, and knew he was in the right place when he found your car parked on the hill. 

His palms clam on the way up, pine needles crushed to mulch under his cons. Dirt crusts their white toes and puddle water splashes over the tongues, seeping into his socks. The rain slows to a pittering that beads down the arms of his jacket and along the ridge of one finger, welled cold at the line of a titanium ring. 

The string is trodden and dirty on the ground. Eddie toes at it as he goes, the thread red but not taut, leaving you closer than he expects you to be, perched on a picnic table with an umbrella held loosely on one shoulder. 

"Hey," he says, tensing as you tense, softening his voice appropriately. "If you don't wanna see me I understand, and I'll leave, but I wanna talk to you… If that's cool." 

You peer down at the umbrella handle under your fingers. "Sure, Eddie. You don't have to leave." He counts his lucky stars, more when he sits on the bench beside you and you ask, "Are those for me?" 

He fights through nerves, flowers squeezed to death in his grip. "They're for you. I had to buy a couple of bunches. These are the best of the worst." He offers you the flowers, cellophane crinkled in his hand, not half what he pictured but somehow better for being real. "I'm sorry." 

"Don't say sorry for giving me flowers," you murmur in your way, not mindless but small. Not tentative, just careful. 

"I'm not sorry for giving you flowers, I'm sorry that they're wilting. I wanted to get you a bunch from Leaven, you know, impress you even if it was too late. I'm sorry for a lot of things, actually. Mostly kissing you without asking first." He doesn't mean to say it like that— oh woe is me. "I want to be honest with you," he confesses, quieter. "Stuff feels weird and awful." 

"I know what you mean," you say. 

"But talking to you isn't like that. Talking to you is..." He scratched his neck sheepishly. "This is going way worse than I pictured." 

"Yeah. Yeah, it's pretty bad." Your voice is calm against his awkward panic. You aren't ridiculing him, the opposite. You're in the same terrified boat. It's reassuring at least to know he's not alone. 

You put your hand out without turning his way. Eddie stares at it with another gasping round of chest pain but takes it swiftly in both hands, too much. Why are you this fucking weird? he asks himself. 

"I think I believe you." 

Eddie bites the inside of his lip. Your hand is marginally smaller in his, softer by yards, and easy to pet at your admission. He feels this bone deep longing to stroke the back of it and he does, the side of his thumb tracing the faint indentation of bones beneath your skin with the care of someone handling a more delicate artefact, the string shortening, shortening, until it's all but disappeared. You're hardier than a rough hand-hold, he's wanted to do this for so, so long. 

"About what?" he asks. The string? Or his affection?

"About the string." You struggle with the flowers and the umbrella in your other hand but make no attempt to take the first back from his grip. 

He waits for you to say more, seconds turning to minutes, his palm growing sweaty in yours. Eddie wants to be cool like a rockstar who knows you want him and doesn't care, and he wants to be sweet and gentle and give you the respect you deserve, but mostly he wants to make it out of this conversation with you at his side. He's not sure how to do it, but holding your hand as you want him to is a start. 

"I have to ask you something," you say finally, as though the words have been dragged from the root of you. "This string… this isn't all a joke, is it? That would be– that would be sick. If it's not real." 

"No!" Eddie interrupts. "It's not a joke, I get if you think I'm crazy but I'm not trying to mess you around–" 

"I don't think you're crazy. This whole situation is crazy. It doesn't make sense." 

"But you believe me?" he asks. What he's really asking is Would you believe me, please? He's so tired of being alone with this. 

"I found this book at the library." Your hand livens in his, your fingers pushing between his to twine together solidly. "Talking about the red thread of fate. There's a myth that people who are destined to get married have an invisible string tied from their fingers. It gets bigger and smaller, and you can't cut it no matter how hard you try, but I still didn't know if I believed you. You could've read the same book." 

Didn't know. Past tense. "What changed your mind?" 

"How would you know where I was if you were lying? We're twenty minutes outside of town." 

"I could be a stalker." 

"Do you want me to believe you?" you ask with a laugh. 

"Of course I do," he says warmly, spurred by your laughter, pulling your arm bodily into his and encouraging you closer. "You don't have to believe that we're destined to be together, but the string is real." 

"And you like me." 

Eddie's turn to laugh. "I do, yeah. So much it's embarrassing." 

"Everybody knows but me?" 

"Kind of." 

"Oh." You lay your cheek against his shoulder. Almost like you're testing his limits to see if you're allowed. 

Rain dots lightly on his jacket arm, the chill of the weather sudden and obvious. He covers your wrist with his hand to hide you from it, knowing he should offer to take you somewhere warmer but needing to stretch this moment, his chest alleviated of anxiety pangs for the first time in almost a week. 

"You really think I'm pretty?" you ask quietly. 

Eddie stares at the top of your head. "You're the sweetest thing I've ever seen. Even if you don't believe it yourself, you're beautiful." 

It's not that Eddie thinks you're going to cry but you come apart, slow fissures in the last of your strength. He takes the bouquet from you to lay on the table behind and closes your umbrella, letting the drizzling rain kiss the tops of both your heads. You look as nervous as he feels. "Come here," he says, desperate for you to feel better. "C'mere." 

You sew your arms under his as he wraps his around your shoulders, the string stretching so as not to hurt you. Your voice comes rushed and low, honesty now that you're no longer face to face, "I like you too, Eddie. Ever since you made me that paper crane, I think." 

He rubs your back. "You don't have to sound upset about it," he teases, trying to rescue you from tears. He'd hate to see you cry. 

"This has all been such a mess." 

He hugs you harder. "I know. I promise I'll make it up." 

"But it's not your fault." 

"Maybe, but that's kind of the point of being with someone. Looking after each other, cleaning up messes. I want to." 

"You're with me," you repeat carefully. 

Eddie pulls back, taking your face into his hand. The string lines your cheek like a teardrop curved down the slope of it. He strokes the red thread gently with his thumb. "I want to be. You think that could work? Us?" 

Your fingers curl into the crook of his elbow. You nod into his touch. "If this isn't a trick."  

"It's not a trick. I'm in love with you," —he wants to lean in, and he can't, not yet, not while a fraction of you still thinks he couldn't want you sincerely— "everything about you. I think I have been for a while." 

"In love…" you murmur into yourself. 

You lean forward slowly, stilted, and when Eddie leans in to meet you your eyes flutter closed. Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck, he thinks. He might have kissed you before but he doesn't remember it anymore than a phantom, a ghost, the echo of a memory. He remembers what he said and the blooming pain of his hand kicking back into his eye a thousand times clearer than how your lips felt, he has no idea what you like, where to put his hands—

You kiss him first. You lean in, and you kiss him gingerly, waiting for an impending cruelty or rejection that's never going to come. He keeps it gentle, holding his breath as the tip of his nose slides across yours and his head tilts to allow better access, a proper, full kiss. 

For someone who hasn't had very many, you're a good kisser. A little too still. Eddie sees no harm in it, moving back a millimetre to wade in again immediately, his left hand rising to join the right on your warming face and prompting you into a braver reciprocation. 

He smiles at the feeling of your bottom lip pressed against the seam of his mouth. His jacket sleeve creaks as your grip tightens. 

It's a lovely kiss, even if it's tenuously taken. It's everything. For a while the rain doesn't matter, steams off of him, but it must fall too harshly for you to ignore, peeling away from him, so, so carefully. He meets your softened gaze with a similar expression. For once, you seem completely present, and better, your smile is real. 

"Was that okay?" he asks, sliding his hands down the lines of your neck, feeling for nothing in particular. Feeling to feel, wanting to learn every hill and bow of you. 

"It was better than the first two," you say, an endearingly bashful answer.  

"That's not difficult. One was from a wet-nosed, mouth-breathing imbecile and the other one was from Cory Wilson." 

You laugh without restraint, a full-bodied sound that echoes down his arms. "I think you mixed that up," you say nicely. 

Flirting! Eddie could burst into tears. "You think? How about slimy, frizzy loser?" His hand lives a life of its own, squeezing your shoulder as he suggests, "Desperate and unobsequious uggo?" 

Raindrops catch your forehead as you tip your head back briefly, laughter bubbling on your lips, your relief a palpable saccharine. "In what world are you an uggo?" 

"What, do you like me or something?" He takes another kiss, lips lingering, longing for just a few more seconds. "Notice how you didn't disagree with 'desperate'? 'Unobsequious'?" he murmurs, a quarter inch from your mouth. 

"You're not desperate," you murmur back, almost inaudible under the patter of rain. 

"But?" 

"But I don't think unobsequious is a word." 

"No?" he asks, kissing you again. The awkwardness is gone, replaced by a melding need. "You don't think so?" 

"No," you defend. He can hear your fondness. 

Eddie presses a tight kiss hard enough to feel the impression of your teeth over your lips before tearing himself away. Kissing you isn't a tenth of what he wants from you; there's a lot to tell you. He needs to start now. 

Your lips part as though you've a question to ask, too, but you bring a distracted hand to his hair. "Your hair's getting curlier in the rain. It's…" 

You falter. 

"I'm drowned, huh?" he asks. 

You try to say no. Your hand wavers shy of a coil, listless, "No way," you whisper, eyes on your hand now, on your marriage finger and the red string playing at your knuckle, shimmering with a fish-scale sparkle as you pinch it between your thumb and forefinger on the opposite hand. "I can see it." 

"You can see it?" Eddie asks, leaping onto his feet. 

Your face is transformed, infinitely, impossibly prettier by your beaming smile as you clamber to stand in front of him, stretching the string between your bodies experimentally. "I can see it!" 

"You can see it?" he asks, vaulting his weight into you, his arms working around your back in a squeeze. 

You pull your arm up between you both and twist your wrist this way and that, the string following your whims as you lean back in the circle of his arms. Your eyes flicker between him and the string, as though you're working out which one is an illusion. Eddie and the string are both real. 

"We're really soulmates."

Eddie doesn't know if he believes in soulmates, but he believes in the hopeful colour to your voice as you say it, and the tacky skin of your cheek as he leans in for your fifth kiss, your sixth, each one better than the last. 

If his soulmate were going to be someone, he'd want nothing more than for it to be you. 

—

"Come on! We're so late!" 

Steve detaches himself from the frankly killer novel in his lap to turn, his sunglasses casting you and Eddie in a sepia tone as he drags you bodily down the path to their picnic spot. You giggle girlishly at Eddie's telling off and the bodily nature of his pushing, flopped like a fish out of water in his arms. 

"I'm hurrying, Eds, you're just faster than me." 

Eddie pretends to drop you, to your roaring delight, your laugh echoing across the park and drawing the eyes of Steve's summer club. 

"Here comes happy and happier," Robin groans. 

"You wanted them to date," Steve says, turning to his best friend where she lays on the blanket beside him, his jacket a pillow under her neck. "You have sleep in your eyes." 

"I'm tired," she defends, struggling into a sitting position. She wipes her eyes with the bottoms of her palms, mean, words stretched with a yawn as she continues, "Please tell me Eddie has the basket." 

"Nope," Max says, slamming down on her knees next to Robin, her jeans already grass-stained. 

"Y/N has it," Lucas clarifies, sitting down with them in similar fashion. 

Steve's daunted by them when they're together, but he leaves his commentary at an unintelligible curse word, his head tipped back in annoyance. They're constantly pulling the carpet from under him, practically manufacturing flaws to tease him about, Max whip-smart and Lucas loyal to a fault. 

Still, he likes them. 

More than he likes Dustin when the curly-haired boy sits down next to Steve and takes his hat off. "Feel how sweaty this is getting." 

"Rather not, dude." 

Eddie speaks, closer now, and Steve misses the words but not the tone of them. Dripping, almost sleazy affection, the kind that knows what it is unabashedly. You stand on toes to kiss the highest point of his cheek as quickly as you can, your hand on his trap.

"Hey!" Eddie shouts to their turned head, waving a hand of rings, calluses and bandaids. "You guys look like meerkats." 

His cheeks are rosy red with blush despite the moderate temperatures today, the sun set to come out in an hour or two when the cloud cover moves. Said meerkats make room for you on the picnic blanket, where you share the bounty of your basket, sandwiches and cut fruit. "There are chips in the car," you say. 

"You cut up fruit?" Robin asks. 

"Eddie did. I watched." 

"And ate the best cuts," Eddie says proudly, wrapping his arm around your shoulder to drown you in a hug. You slink an arm begins him to hug him in return, your face pressed with delight to the curve of his neck. "As is her right." 

"Don't be disgusting!" Mike calls, a baseball bat in unconfident hands.

"You sure you know how to use that thing?" Eddie calls back. "Lucas, I thought you were helping him, man? Help him!"

"Some people are beyond help." 

"Shut up, Dustin." 

Despite an abundance of company and a ton of shit to do, you and Eddie are distracted by one another, and Steve isn't stupid enough to not get why. They didn't see you both for a week, and then you emerged from your self-imposed quarantine as grossly in love with one another as Steve has ever seen two people be. Like, maybe the happiest couple ever. In some loud ways but mostly quiet ones, hands held, fond cheek kisses to say hello, these weird paper birds you make for each other whenever there's a scrap of paper left lying around. Eddie's doing it now, having stolen the sticky note Steve was using as a bookmark to craft a teeny tiny crane, Steve, their called cranes. One second it's a pink diamond and the next he's performing an intricate twist, four last folds, and placing the finished product on your knee. 

Steve's sort of jealous, but you guys are too in love, honestly. It's nice if you're in it but too intimate if you aren't (nothing maliciously done, of course), so he rounds up the troops for the first round of baseball to give you guys some privacy. 

If he's expecting you two to start French kissing when he leaves, he's not correct. He wouldn't know it, back turned to you as he takes first bat, knees bent and waiting for Erica to serve, but you guys talk. Talk talk talk. Eddie can talk for Indiana and you listen in your way, wryly amused, promising any minute now that you're gonna get up and spread out on the field.

"Is this a bad idea, sports? What if it beheads someone?" 

"It knows how to behave," Eddie assuages, hand on the blanket next to your thighs, turned toward you, effectively locking you in. "We don't wanna get that involved. You look too good right now to ruin."

Nothing can fix the insecurities you hold instantly, but knowing someone wants to kiss you regularly has helped. Eddie's constant compliments have done even better. He's easy about it, no fuss, no bravado, praise said like fact. Come here, pretty girl, I got a present for you. Hey, gorgeous. You should do my hair, yours always looks so good. And the photos —he has a disposable in the glove box, and insists on taking photos of you when you're especially happy. Now that he's your guy, that's often. 

"You're saying I wouldn't look good if I sweat this off?" you ask, gesturing to your face and your makeup. 

"I know you'd look good." He dips down for a kiss, as if daring you to suggest otherwise. It's a touch rough, twice as devoted. Things are heady for a time, the two of you stealing another short moment to add to the list, your kiss made of twin smiles.  "Maybe we can use it to our advantage," he suggests, pulling back to stroke your cheek. 

"The string?" you ask. 

Eddie steals a last quick peck before his hand climbs onto your leg, giving your denim-clad thigh a pat. "We'll use it to trip people up. Come on, it'll be fun. We'll get Harrington flat on his ass," he says, clambering onto sure footing.

"No way," you say, leaning back to see him, your hand nudging aside a plate of sandwiches. You shield your eyes from the sun as it comes out, sunlight like spun gold spilling down your arm. "I'm not helping you hurt your friends." 

"What, those guys? They're just my D&D subs." 

You shake your head at him in disapproval. 

"I'm kidding!" he says, reaching down for your hands. "Get up, sweetheart, we'll only trip someone if we need to win. Stop fighting me, you know it's useless. I always win." 

"You cheat," you sigh, letting him help you onto your feet. 

"I cheat," he agrees, kissing your cheek, then the opposite, before holding them in both hands and leaning in. "I love how you sound when you know you're losing–" 

"Shut up–" 

"You get all breathless," he says, his face drifting closer, and closer, "all shy on me." 

"If I knew you were gonna try and embarrass me this much I never would've said yes to being your girlfriend," you say, half-glaring at him with a wave of affection brimming behind your poor acting. 

"Really?" he asks. His voice is low, a little rough. 

"No. But you have to stop, okay?" You laugh, nudging him in the stomach with your knuckles. "I wanna play baseball." 

Steve waves Eddie over from home base to field on his team while you join Max, Robin, and Lucas in line to bat. "This isn't enough people for baseball," Eddie says, crushing emerald green bluegrass beneath his shoes. The rainfall last week made for lush vegetation. 

"Yeah, which is why you were supposed to invite more people," Steve quips. 

"I was busy." Eddie rolls his shoulders. "We don't need more people to win. We got this." 

"We do not got this! And no going easy on Y/N, okay? I don't care if you're together, we need to play to win. Loser's buying the winner's pizza and I just got Sheila out of the shop."  

"Are you kidding?" Eddie asks, stretching his arm behind his head, his eyes across the field where you laugh at Robin's side. "Obviously I'm not going easy on her. Why would you think that?" 

"Seriously? This is the worst honeymoon phase I've ever seen. I figured you guys wouldn't even be able to play on different teams, like, major separation anxiety." 

Eddie does this thing with his hand, his thumb plucking an invisible string. "I don't need to worry, man. I know exactly where she is." 

˚ʚ♡ɞ˚

thank you for reading, especially if you got all the way to the end! hope you enjoyed ♥

#eddie munson #eddie munson x reader #eddie munson x you #eddie munson x y/n #eddie munson x fem!reader #eddie munson imagine #eddie munson fluff #eddie munson fanfic #eddie munson oneshot #eddie munson scenario #eddie munson drabble #eddie munson fic #eddie munson fanfiction #stranger things fanfiction #stranger things #stranger things fic #stranger things x reader #stranger things 4

[pucksandpower]

I just read No Nut November (absolutely fantastic btw I loved it) and I was so ready during the seduction moment for y/n to use Lando to get off and then deny him anything further "because you don't want to lose your bet" 😂😂

I love you so much for sharing this amazing idea with me (and I couldn’t resist writing an alternate version of that scene based on it)

Original fic: No Nut November

warning: 18+ content

Lando kicks the bedroom door shut behind you as his lips meet yours again hungrily. All thoughts of No Nut November are clearly out the window now.

Your hands fumble urgently with the hem of his shirt, breaking the kiss just long enough to tug it over his head. He returns the favor, peeling off your top and bra in one smooth motion.

Skin pressing against skin, you both groan at the contact you’ve been craving. Lando’s hands grip your hips, steering you toward the bed until the back of your legs hit the mattress. You let yourself fall backward, pulling him down on top of you.

Your lips find each other again as your hands explore eagerly. Lando kisses down your jaw to your neck, nipping and sucking in a way that makes you squirm against him.

“God I’ve missed this,” you breathe out as his fingers trail over your breast.

He hums in agreement, his touch lighting sparks across your skin. Your back arches off the bed as his mouth closes over your nipple.

Tangling your hands in his hair, you guide him lower, gasping when his lips reach the waistband of your leggings. He looks up at you questioningly and you nod eagerly.

In one smooth motion he tugs them off, followed swiftly by your underwear. You’re completely bare before him now and trembling in anticipation.

Lando’s eyes drink you in hungrily. “Fuck, you’re so beautiful,” he growls before diving in.

You cry out as his tongue finds your clit, gripping the sheets tightly. He works you expertly, ramping up the pressure until you are writhing and moaning. Your orgasm builds fast and hard, his name tumbling from your lips.

“Yes, yes Lando! Don’t stop!” You pant out. Your climax crashes over you powerfully, stars bursting behind your eyelids.

Lando works you through it gently before moving back up to kiss you deeply. You can taste yourself on his lips and it makes you impossibly more turned on.

As you come down from your high, you move back down his body with a wicked gleam in your eye. His briefs are obscenely tented now and you stroke him firmly over the cotton, making him groan loudly.

Breaking the kiss, you flip him onto his back. “Your turn now,” you purr, kissing a trail down his chest.

Lando groans, tangling a hand in your hair. “God yes, please ...” He’s rock hard and straining against the fabric keeping him restricted.

Hooking your fingers in his waistband, you free his erection, licking your lips at the sight. “Mmm, look at you all ready for me,” you hum approvingly.

You swirl your tongue around his tip as Lando gasps and clenches the sheets. Taking him into your mouth, you set a fast pace, sucking hard.

“Fuck, baby, just like that,” Lando chokes out, completely unravelling under your ministrations. You feel a surge of power knowing you have him right where you want him.

Hollowing your cheeks, you drive him right to the edge, his thighs trembling. Then suddenly you release him with a pop and move away.

Lando’s eyes fly open. “W-what ... why are you stopping?” He protests breathlessly.

You give him an innocent look. “Oh, did you want to come, darling?” You ask sweetly.

He gapes at you. “You little minx, you know I was so close!”

You grin slyly. “Guess you’ll just have to wait until next month then.” You move back up to kiss him deeply, rocking your core torturously against his painfully hard length.

Lando groans into your mouth, his hands clutching at you desperately. When you break away, he looks utterly wrecked.

“Now go take a cold shower before you lose your little bet,” you pat his chest mockingly and climb off the bed, sashaying your hips on the way out.

You hear Lando let out a string of curses as you leave him high and dry. Chuckling to yourself, you know he’ll be begging you for release again soon enough. But for today, his torment is payback for this silly No Nut November nonsense.

Later when Lando emerges from the shower, you greet him sweetly. “Feeling better, babe?”

He narrows his eyes but can’t keep a resigned smile off his face. “You’re evil, do you know that? Two can play this game though.”

You just laugh and kiss his cheek. “Maybe so. But I do love watching you squirm.” You sneak down a teasing hand to squeeze his ass as you pass by.

Lando catches your wrist, pulling you against him. “Just you wait until December,” he growls into your ear, making you shiver.

As frustrating as this month will be, you can’t deny riling Lando up is fun. Bring on the teasing — you’re quite happy to make him suffer if it means mind-blowing victory sex down the road.

#f1 imagine #f1 #f1 fic #f1 fanfic #f1 fanfiction #f1 x reader #f1 x you #lando norris #ln4 #lando norris imagine #lando norris x reader #lando norris x you #lando norris fic #lando norris fluff #lando norris fanfic #lando norris blurb #f1 fluff #f1 blurb #f1 one shot #f1 x y/n #f1 drabble #f1 fandom #f1blr #f1 x female reader #lando norris x female reader #lando norris x y/n #mclaren #lando norris one shot #lando norris drabble

[elvirable]

Ambrosia (Act 1)

[ Astarion x f!Reader ] | ao3 link

rating: explicit | word count: 2k | status: ongoing themes/tags: vaginal sex, feelings realization, denial of feelings, light smut.. for now, and a whole lotta angst, will add more smut tho in the next chapters, soulmates, fluff, written as a glimpse into his mind during each act ———–

Astarion would never tell you, though - it was his little secret, one he hid away just for himself.

In other words: A delve into Astarion's thoughts, starting with the day he met you. *will update description at some point. ———– A/N: i wrote this as a peek into Astarion's mind throughout Act 1. plan to continue as i progress throughout the game. lmk what you think and if you like this style!

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Grief had a penchant for wearing different masks.

Phantom faces that slithered through shadows, white-hot wrath that clawed at the throat, an endless gnawing that swallowed one whole: all faces of a primordial monster that had existed before time itself.

Astarion knew all this. 

He had met them all – intimate with its simplest form, a cold polarizing solitude; a loyal companion for two centuries, teaching him to lick his wounds with malice. Others had taken everything from him, or they were too weak to lift a meaningful finger. It took several lifetimes to finally mend his precious pride back together. Why should he practice mercy when no one had shown him any?

And by some stroke of luck, he was free – at least for now. Opportunity had fallen before his feet; he could chase after power, clutch revenge in his pale fingers, walk amongst the sun. Red eyes clung to the light glimmering across the water and wavering leaves. A desperate urge pulsed up his spine, insisting he memorize each saturated detail before it faded away like the most ethereal dream. The exhilaration rose wildly before plummeting to the pits of his stomach.

Huh, that was odd. It had never dawned on him that grief could also bloom in the slow, golden sunlight.

Languid beams washed against his flesh and through the faint hem of his shirt. Every fiber of his skin ached, dull and shallow, at the sacred warmth that had been a stranger for so long. He felt this haunted and holy gift – the vigor of life from each ray of light running over his fair face. Reunited once again, like long-lost lovers.

It was the sound of boots thudding against dirt that pulled him back into the world, on the ravaged beachfront. 

With straight posture, a hollow smile painted itself across his lips. ==

“You have your mother’s eyes, you know.”

No, he didn’t know.

Quiet was this small voice that, for some odd reason, had grasped onto his conscience the night he died. It had sung loud in the beginning, but now it was just a whisper. Everything else had reduced to dust, long-buried beneath the cold earth. 

But if he could conjure the ghost of his mother, he couldn’t be bothered to. Astarion envisioned a sharp tsk , a scowl dripping with disgust if she could see the creature he was today: a thrall to his own hedonistic desires, wielding manipulation and seduction as an instrument. A vampire , taking solace amongst the shadows and draining the life around him.

Maybe he was the same, just calloused and rearranged by the fate spun for him. 

However, there was no need to exhume the past. It proved futile anyway; he couldn’t even recall the previous hue of his eyes, much less run his hands over his reflection. The only thing worthy of concern was survival. Memories had been shrouded by the same pivotal virtue, the one that carved the habit to become shapeless – to cater to every impulse and whim of those who could serve useful. Those who could protect him, at least for the time being.

And that was exactly what he tried with you, as his breath was inches from your slender neck and your eyes widened in hazy alarm, catching him by surprise. 

“Shit.”

You scuttered to your feet in the frantic silence, dozens of excuses fluttering to Astarion’s tongue. The fatigue of bloodthirst hindered his wit, but he raised his palms in reservation.

He had already taken note of your misleading presence – you were small, but heavens , would you put up a fight. Other companions had already turned towards you for guidance the past few days, and you were carved with a beauty that could intimidate. Though, there were cracks underneath that facade – ones with darkness in between. 

Peering into these cracks was his only outlet to earn your trust; after all, it was paramount for survival.

“I – I wasn’t going to hurt you,” exasperated breaths pushed from his throat. “I just needed, well.. blood.”

Basked in the dim firelight, your wary gaze studied him for what he really was: a vampire, a slave to sanguine hunger. He caught the stutter in your furrowed brows before they eased. Smug delight settled in his nerves when you, although with apprehension, allowed him to taste you.

Astarion eagerly obliged, immediately losing himself in the euphoria– the sweet vigor of your blood, how silky and rich. A low hum vibrated in his throat, and he barely registered when your palms pushed his broad weight off of you. Lush satisfaction that quenched his blood-thirst still coursed through him like a stimulant, but he still caught the tail-end of your groan.

“I don’t care that you’re a vampire. Just –,” you paused briefly to reel from your daze. “We’re all a team now, so I have to have some trust in you. Just ask next time.”

He felt happy, more alive – not only from the fresh blood still lingering on his tongue, but that you trusted him. Maybe not entirely, but the anchor had already been dropped; one step closer to wrapping you around his finger, even if you weren’t entirely flexible. He could feel it in your gaze, in the little quivers that rolled through you while his fangs sunk into your soft skin.

Once you had returned to sleep and his frenzied nerves quelled, he mulled over your parting words. You weren’t phased’ that he was a vampire, instead placing emphasis on trust. You were full of surprises – especially when the entire world met him with repulse.

Something that had been fossilized inside him tremored, as if it began to thaw. ==

There was a thin chill in the evening air, in the way nature prepares for a new season. And he hated you. 

Well, he didn’t hate you – frankly, he couldn’t get enough of you; that was the issue. 

You plagued his thoughts like a helpless addiction, better yet like a mirror; one he had repeatedly peered into, struggling to find the right angle and when he did – he was left staring at you.

Those careful eyes – a mocking reminder of everything he could have been. So different, so resilient, so disgustingly kind.

Since the day he laid eyes on you, he was the first to glimpse at your secret hidden in plain sight. Your habit of hiding yourself from everyone you came across, retreating behind stone-bared walls and tailoring a facade just enough to avoid drawing attention. Reserved lips were a mere confirmation you sealed away a vault of grief that you didn’t want – or need – clumsy, temporary hands to pry open. 

That discreet resolve particularly made you the sour dagger twisting between his ribs. Grief had been your companion as well, but its mark never trickled from anywhere else – not a warbled voice or frustrated bout. It was only noticeable through a fleeting glint in your eyes. Meanwhile, he had made this medley of rage and anguish his armor. It had fused to skin, and he no longer knew how to scrape it off. Astarion dedicated decades to cursing the Gods. You ignored them.

He knew he should despise you and eagerly await the day he could shatter this mirror you were – but all bitterness dissolved in your presence. You had become his wonderfully terrible affliction; withdrawals could damn near kill him if they were to happen.

Ribbons unraveled from his chest with each conversation, whether it pertained to the graveness of the journey or a simple ‘good morning’ from your lips. Strange yet blissful, he could feel himself surrendering every bitter pang for the peculiar sensation of… comfort .

Once laced with such harshness, his mind eased with familiarity. An interesting chord of harmony, he thought, the two of you. From the start of the journey until now, you shared an enriching balance. He would encourage you to be more outspoken, while you stirred him to be authentic and soft – even if you weren’t aware. 

You were stable like bedrock; never once expecting to be selfless or pious, instead only demanded transparency – at least to the extent he was willing to concede. Aside from the occasional brow-raise or retort, judgment never twisted your face. Respect was a new sensation to him, as you gave him yours.

This dynamic, this balance ; it was irresistibly and invariably warm. 

==

The rendezvous sort of just fell into habit. 

Every night he would savor the ambrosia from your neck, and one evening tension gave way to carnal desire. Whether it was a simple cathartic release or not, he didn’t care; tender moments bathed in amber firelight or the hush of the night had always left him craving more.

“You’re such a tease .”

You’d whisper those words every so often those sacred nights, and a rakish grin would slide across his face without fail. Lust gripped him, but never once weaved with routine; the way your legs parted to invite him in left Astarion with an insatiable urge to indulge in everything you were willing to give him. He could spend the entire evening with his head between your thighs, cold hands steadying your quivering legs as his tongue lured you to new heights of pleasure – giving you exactly what you needed. 

When he was with you – skin pressed together, desperate hums like honey – he began to relish in taking things slow. 

He preferred the nights where your bare body writhed beneath him and melted against his, while he eagerly coaxed wispy whines from your lips. No matter how wet and ready you were, his girth always met resistance as he parted your warm, sensitive walls. Your skin buzzed at the sensation of his cock splitting you open, like every time was the first you’ve been touched.

Desire laced every word he whispered into the curve of your neck, each encouraging and soft. His pace was slow, pushing into the depth of your core, buried deep enough to kiss your cervix with each thrust. Low, guttural grunts left his throat as your body’s natural instinct clenched around his throbbing cock. 

Despite his centuries of experience, he found himself struggling to restrain from succumbing to the all-consuming euphoria of it all: your lashes wet from your tears, precious gasps warm against his skin, the desirous ache to fuck you the way that pretty face beckoned to be fucked. 

The unbridled intimacy – which felt so real and tender was enough to send him over the edge. His veins hummed with yearning as he drank in the vision beneath him; your skin flushed, shaky whines that sung his name as he pushed you to pleasure. And when you wrapped your legs to press him deeper – he surrendered to the white-hot bliss. 

Although Astarion would never tell a soul, his most treasured moments were spent after desperate breaths calmed and the entire world stilled.

It was never long before you lulled into sleep, and your weight slacked against his broad chest. He lingered over each detail with softer eyes; the gentle curl of your lashes, a freckle he had missed the last time. Peace graced such beautiful features, ones that were usually still with resolve. There had never been another face quite like yours in the two centuries he had lurked amongst the earth.

Your chest rose and fell slowly before you would eventually fidget, still deep in slumber, to slink an arm over his waist. His gentle hand grasped the one that rested against his chest, careful not to stir you, as he ran his fingers over your silk skin. Such delicate hands, he mused, that had to grapple their way through life.

He pressed a silent kiss against the back of your palm before laying it back on his chest. 

In the silence, something washed over him – that rousing feeling that he never knew quite what to make of. 

His eyes swept once more to watch the shuffle of your face, buried now against his side. Your hazy sighs warmed his bare skin. Astarion could almost laugh, imagining your face reddening if he ever shared how affectionate you were in your sleep.

Though he would never tell you – it was his little secret, one he hid away just for himself.

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