#i have made this joke to my friend and now i can legally say it

[saeist]

"how many times do i have to say it? no" nagi breathes out, barely even acknowledging your presence as he continues to play on his computer in his dorm room

with a loud huff, loud enough for him to hear even with his headphones on, you flop down at his bed, sprawling your arms around as you stare up at his ceiling

"c'mon sei! i'm literally almost legal but yet i still don't even have a first boyfriend, let alone a first kiss!" you complained, throwing your hands over you face

you see nagi shrug before retorting something along the lines of 'what does that have to do with me'

"nagiiiiii" you drag out, hoping to get a reaction from him. to which, you do get a reaction from him! his signature look of boredom.

"fine. i'll help you"

"yay" you clapped your hands

"only if you buy me 5 battlepasses and whatever i want on the nightmarket" nagi bargains

with a deep sigh, you agree "fine!"

after a bit of more complaining to nagi that you were infact bitchless for most of your life and you're getting a little desperate to get some action as you are a junior in college and two, most of your other friends that isn't nagi are in relationships which makes you a tad bit jealous that you are gonna die alone anyway without getting some any action

you don't know how you even got to this point of the conversation where whether or not nagi has or had been in relationships but here you are now

"so wait, let me get this straight.." you pause, holding your palm out as a way of making nagi pause whatever he's mumbling about, "you already kissed someone?"

nagi shrugs again, "it was only because of some spin the bottle shit reo made me play at some party we went to"

"so that makes you experienced then?"

"not really"

"but you already have your first kiss?"

"i guess?"

"then you are experienced!"

nagi gives you a puzzled look as he lies down next to you. "what do you want me to do then?" he asked, just so he can be done with it

"i want you to teach me how to kiss" you turn to look at him with a glint of your eyes that basically screams "i am determined to get the perfect first kiss with someone i will pursue"

nagi looks dumbfounded at your completely bizarre request. he looked at you like you just grew a second head

"what the fuck"

in the end nagi does eventually give in (not because you totally bribed him again into buying him an entire collection worth of items at his nightmarket and some battlepasses that could easily be around 3 months worthwhile)

so now here you were, seated across from nagi, ready to learn how to kiss and what better way to learn than to ask your best (and only) friend at your college!

"so do i just close my eyes or..?" you start, beginning to feel self aware at the situation that you brought yourself onto

"i'd prefer that" nagi retorts, making you giggle a bit because of how funny he sounded

"okay.. okay" you breathe, closing your eyes as you slowly start leaning in.

"... my eyes are now closed"

for the record, nagi didn't really mind nor care if you opted to opening your eyes while doing this whole thing but he just doesn't want to see you see him all worked up

"i'm leaning in" nagi warns you, so that you won't feel like he's being invasive or all that funky shit. basically he just didn't want you to get the wrong idea

and so, your lips meet.

"congrats, you got your first kiss" nagi casually says as not even a millisecond later, he pulls away and moves to the other side of his bed

"nagi! that was barely even a kiss!"

"how would you know if you never had it before this?" he retorts, making you heat up in partial embarrassment because it was true that you didn't have your first kiss yet and the other reason being which that he was technically your first kiss

"i-i just know, okay damn it!" you stammered, "let's do it again!"

"if you want to kiss me that badly just say so" nagi attempts to make a joke to lighten up the dampen mood but from what you think, he just worsened the whole situation

"haha very funny nag–" before you could even finish your sentence, nagi crashes his lips against yours.

instinctively you placed your hands over his chest to which he places them over his neck, giving him more room to suck your face off.

you may or may not have accidentally moaned in the midst of this activity you two were doing which prompted into something more

you were now laying flat at his bed with him hovering you. still not breaking the kiss whatsoever. his shirt long gone, now at the floor. everything was going smooth

that is until reo decides it would be the most perfect time to barge in to tell nagi about how he just got a new pair of soccer shoes that were issued at the latest soccer magazine

"nagi! you'll never believe what i just got! it's the one messi just wore at the cover of– JESUS CHRIST"

reo basically shrieked, shielding his eyes with said magazine.

you and nagi basically separated. your eyes dart to nagi's shirtless body and to reo who was looking between you and nagi. just in time for a hypothetical light bulb to pop up at the top of his head

"oh.. i'm just gonna" reo throws his thumb back at nagi's door and dashes out before yelling "be safe you two!"

when the door closes, you and nagi both sigh in relief that he was gone but the damage was done

"well.."

"uhh.." you fiddled with your fingers, unable to look at nagi in the eye.

"how was that then as your first lesson?" as always, nagi just seems to find a way to try and cut the atmosphere although this time, it worked.

"it was a splendid demonstration. i'll rate it a 8/10" you applaud

nagi crawls over to you with a small mischievous glint in his eyes. he traps you in between his arms as he stares down at you.

"just an 8?"

feeling a little frisky, and obviously enjoying what was going on earlier right before reo interrupted, you decide that maybe learning from nagi wouldn't hurt a thing or two

you throw your hands over nagi's neck before responding to him

"could you show me how you did that thing earlier with your tongue again? i couldn't quite get that" you say in a fake curious tone making nagi chuckle

"okay. let me demonstrate it to you again. thoroughly" nagi whispers before catching your lips with his.

you went to school with nagi's hoodie the next day and people (and reo) could only guess why

#blue lock imagines #bllk imagines #blue lock x reader #bllk x reader #nagi imagines #nagi x reader #nagi seishiro imagines #nagi seishiro x reader #nagi scenarios #nagi x you #nagi fluff #nagi seishiro scenarios #nagi seishiro x you #nagi seishiro fluff #nagi seishiro #nagi #dont ask why im suddenly a nagi fucker

[munson-blurbs]

Can I request something with Eddie x reader in a long term relationship. They didn’t meet until their mid to late 20s. maybe they are out to dinner one time with his old highschool buddies and she hears them joke about how eddie always wanted to fuck a cheer leader. she gets the bright idea to buy a cheer leader out fit with a tiny skirt and pom poms and wears it for him one day

Oh, now this is what I'm talking about. Written with the gorgeous queen of fluffy smut, @corroded-hellfire 💚

Warnings: smut (18+ only, minors DNI), oral (m! receiving), unprotected p in v, Reader wears a cheerleading uniform, mention of Eddie's crush on Chrissy

WC: 1.8k

Divider credit to @saradika

It’s not the first time you’ve met any of the guys from your boyfriend’s old Hellfire gang. It is the first time that you’ve been around them as a group, though. They’re much louder in a pack—not necessarily trying to shout, just be heard over the guy who is telling a story next to them. 

The guys are funny though and you’re enjoying getting a glimpse of what High School Eddie was like from those who got to experience it first hand. It wasn’t terribly long ago that they were all in high school together; you’re all only in your twenties. But Eddie seems to groan every time there’s a reminder that the youngest guys in the group can legally drink now. 

“So tell me more about this hellion during his younger years,” you say with a laugh, draping an arm over his denim-clad shoulders. “Because he claims to have been a total badass, but he’s such a teddy bear.” To emphasize your point, you smack a wet kiss to his cheek. 

Eddie blushes but doesn’t wipe it off; instead, he tilts your chin till you’re facing him and kisses you until the group throws wadded-up paper napkins at you both. 

“This guy was definitely not a teddy bear,” Lucas says. “I asked him to postpone one Hellfire meeting so I could play in the championship basketball game, and he put me on probation!”

You look at Eddie, slack-jawed. “Eds!” you chastise him teasingly. 

“It was the last campaign of the year!” Eddie rebuts. “Actions have consequences, Sinclair.”

Lucas rolls his eyes and takes a sip of his drink, using his free hand to flip off his friend. 

Dustin cackles at the exchange. “Yeah, he was pretty much an asshole to everyone.” His voice is mischievous as he waggles his eyebrows and adds, “except Chrissy Cunningham.”

“Ooh,” you mimic Dustin’s playful tone. “And who is Chrissy Cunningham?”

“Head cheerleader, cute and blonde, super sweet to, like, everybody,” Mike pipes up.

Eddie gets flustered, not because Chrissy was brought up, but he thinks hearing about his crush on her might upset or annoy you. He sputters over his words, which just riles him up even more. 

“I don’t think we need to, uh, talk about that,” Eddie says, shaking his head.

“Why? What happened?” you ask with a frown. It was no secret between you and Eddie that neither of you were popular in high school and had crushes that went unrequited. But Eddie never told you about anything particularly bad happening between him and a cheerleader.

“What?” Eddie asks before realizing what you mean. “Oh, no! Nothing happened. We spoke maybe a handful of times ever. I just didn’t think this would be something you would want to hear about…”

Eddie brow pinches in worry but you just laugh and wave a dismissive hand.

“Eddie, come on. Who wouldn’t have a crush on the sweet, pretty cheerleader? I mean, I had a thing for my school’s star basketball player back in the day. You know that.”

Lucas laughs. “You definitely would’ve hated the star basketball player at our school.”

“Kid was a total douche,” Jeff adds. “Made these obnoxious, over-the-top speeches that had everybody rolling their eyes.”

“So, like Eddie, but athletic,” Gareth chimes in, putting his hands up in surrender when Eddie shoots him a look and then breaks into a grin. 

The waiter brings out a chocolate cake, loudly singing Happy Birthday to Eddie, which promptly puts a stop to their bickering and taunting. The guys lock in on the dessert, serving Eddie the first slice before turning into barbarians over the second. 

You finally manage to snag a slice among the chaos, but your mind is elsewhere. If Eddie was as into cheerleaders like his friends claim, you might be able to finagle one last birthday surprise.

A week passes from the dinner-turned-impromptu-Hellfire-meeting. Eddie saunters through the door, tossing his keys on the counter. 

“Babe? You home?” His hair is kept in a low bun; it’s easier to work on cars with it out of his face. 

“In the bedroom!” you call back from behind a half-closed door. 

Eddie kicks his boots off in the general direction of the welcome mat. “How was your day, sweetheart?” he asks as he walks down the hallway towards your room. “Mine was pretty good. I just—holy shit.” He comes to a halt in the doorway, jaw dropping open as he stares at you. 

You lounge on the bed waiting for him, a green and white cheerleading uniform on. There wasn’t one with some yellow on it as well like Hawkins High’s had when you’d gone looking, but you didn’t think your boyfriend would mind. 

He stands frozen and it makes you let out a small giggle before trying to regain the seductive air you’d been going for. 

“Wh…What’s all this?” he manages, caught completely off-guard by your outfit of choice. 

“Just your own personal cheerleader,” you say nonchalantly, crooking your finger and beckoning him over. “Wanna see my pom-poms?”

His grin nearly splits his face in two. “Yeah—wait, do you mean, like, actual ones, or…” he trails off and shakes his head. “Ah, fuck it.” He grabs you and pulls you onto his lap. 

“So, do I get to see a cheer?” he asks with a smirk. “A little, ‘two-four-six-eight, who do we appreciate?’”

You kiss his neck and murmur, “kinda figured my mouth would be busy somewhere else.” Your lips down the pale expanse of bis torso and you unbuckle his belt. 

Eddie groans and leans back against the headboard, eagerly watching you. He lifts his hips enough so you can slide his pants and boxers all the way off and toss them aside. 

You make sure to keep your gaze locked on his as you start to stroke him, using his pre-cum to lubricate your palm. “Tell me what you need, baby.”

He inhales sharply, trying to remain focused. “Need you to suck me off.”

You get on your knees in front of him so he can see down your uniform top, and he twitches against your lips. Flattening your tongue against the base of his shaft, you lick up to the head and wrap your lips around the tip before slowly taking him into your warm, wet mouth. 

“Fuuuuuck,” Eddie breathes out, throwing his head back and exposing his Adam’s apple. “Thassit, just like that.”

The tang of pre-cum is salty on your tongue, and you lap it up gratefully. Your fingers dig into the flesh of his ass as you pull him towards you, your nose grazing his pubic hair. 

“So good, goddamn, honey,” he mumbles, more gibberish than logic, “take me so well. Givin’ me the best fuckin’ head of my life.”

You’re more than happy to continue this, cheeks hollowed and tongue swirling around the sensitive tip, eagerly anticipating his cum down your throat. 

Eddie has other plans. 

He begrudgingly steps back, his throbbing cock thwacking against his stomach. If he pulls out of a blowjob, it usually means—

“Bend over, princess.”

You do as he says, palms pressed into the mattress. He quickly flips up your skirt, exposing your bare ass. 

Eddie laughs triumphantly. “Oh, fuck yes.” He taps the head of his length against it before pushing down on your back, giving him a better view of your pussy. “Mine,” he growls in your ear. 

The moan that tumbles out of your lips from his words only increases tenfold when he pushes inside of you. It makes Eddie smirk in satisfaction as his hands grip your hips beneath the pleats of the skirt. His eyes slip closed as he loses himself in the feeling of you around his cock. 

You whine as Eddie bottoms out, fingers grasping at the blanket below you. “God, Eddie, yes.”

Eddie’s thrusts gain momentum and he pulls your hips back against him for every one, never missing a beat. “Shit, you’re so fucking good for me. Your pussy’s so goddamn tight, fuck.” 

“Mhm, uh-huh.�� The drag of his cock against your walls leaves you speechless, only able to whine, no coherent thoughts in your head. 

“My cheerleader feels good, huh? Aw, baby,” he coos, “so good you can’t even talk, yeah?”

Even if you had the capability to answer, you wouldn’t have time before Eddie pulls out of you for the second time today and flips you onto your back. Your legs fall open for him immediately in this new position and he wastes no time pushing back into you. 

He leans over your body, slipping his hands up the top half of your uniform. “Most beautiful cheerleader I ever fuckin’ saw,” he purrs as his hands grope your chest.

Your legs wrap around his body, only pulling him deeper inside of you. “So good,” you slur, eyes half-lidded. You feel your orgasm crash over you, waves of pleasure rippling through your body. 

Eddie’s hands slip out of your top and run down your arms until he laces his fingers with yours. He lifts your hands over your head, keeping a tight grip on you as his hips pick up the pace. Now that you came, he can take what he needs. 

“So tight,” he mumbles, breathing heavily. You can tell that he’s close. “Gonna cum all over this pretty little uniform of yours, ‘kay?”

You can only nod, and he leans in and kisses you one last time before pulling out and painting you in his release. Sticky warmth coats the exposed strip of flesh between the top and skirt, some of it staining the uniform’s fabric. He moans out your name as he jerks the last of his spend out of his cock.

“Holy shit,” he exhales, drinking in the sight of you in your cheerleader outfit and covered in his cum. His sexy cheerleader wearing his cum. The thought has him almost up for another round already. 

He leans over to the nightstand and reaches for a tissue to clean you up, but you wave him off. Your hand catches his wrist and you softly run your fingertips up to his elbow.

“Leave it,” you tell him with a smirk. “I want it to stain.” You’ll wake up in the morning to it dried on the uniform, a reminder of tonight.

“Goddamn, baby.” Eddie lets out a breathy chuckle and flops down next to you, completely exhausted. “I was not expecting this, but I’m certainly not complaining.” 

“Well,” you say, a teasing lilt in your voice. You push up onto one elbow, and gaze at him knowingly. His hair is a mess, his chest is rising and falling rapidly. He looks wrecked, and it’s a beautiful sight. “You’d better drink some Gatorade, babe. Because this is only halftime.”

--

#eddie munson #eddie munson smut #eddie munson stranger things #eddie munson fanfic #eddie munson fluff #eddie stranger things #stranger things #fanfic #stranger things fanfic #eddie munson x reader #smut

[mostlysignssomeportents]

How a billionaire’s mediocre pump-and-dump “book” became a “bestseller”

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/15/your-new-first-name/#that-dagger-tho

I was on a book tour the day my editor called me and told me, "From now on, your middle name is 'Cory.'"

"That's weird. Why?"

"Because from now on, your first name is 'New York Times Bestselling Author.'"

That was how I found out I'd hit the NYT list for the first time. It was a huge moment – just as it has been each subsequent time it's happened. First, because of how it warmed my little ego, but second, and more importantly, because of how it affected my book and all the books afterwards.

Once your book is a Times bestseller, every bookseller in America orders enough copies to fill a front-facing display on a new release shelf or a stack on a bestseller table. They order more copies of your backlist. Foreign rights buyers at Frankfurt crowd around your international agents to bid on your book. Movie studios come calling. It's a huge deal.

My books became Times bestsellers the old-fashioned way: people bought and read them and told their friends, who bought and read them. Booksellers who enjoyed them wrote "shelf-talkers" – short reviews – and displayed them alongside the book.

That "From now on your first name is 'New York Times Bestselling Author' gag is a tradition. When @wilwheaton's memoir Still Just A Geek hit the Times list, I texted the joke to him and he texted back to say @jscalzi had already sent him the same joke (and of course, Scalzi and I have the same editor, Patrick Nielsen Hayden):

https://www.harpercollins.com/products/still-just-a-geek-wil-wheaton

But not everyone earns that first name the same way. Some people cheat.

Famously, the Church of Scientology was caught buying truckloads of L Ron Hubbard books (published by Scientology's own publishing arm) from booksellers, returning them to their warehouse, then shipping them back to the booksellers when they re-ordered the sold out titles. The tip-off came when booksellers opened cases of books and found that they already bore the store's own price-stickers:

https://www.latimes.com/local/la-scientology062890-story.html

The reason Scientology was willing to go to such great lengths wasn't merely that readers used "NYT Bestseller* to choose which books to buy. Far more important was the signal that this sent to the entire book trade, from reviewers to librarians to booksellers, who made important decisions about how many copies of the books to stock, whether to display them spine- or face out, and whether to return unsold stock or leave it on the shelf.

Publishers go to great lengths to send these messages to the trade: sending out fancy advance review copies in elaborate packaging, taking out ads in the trade magazines, featuring titles in their catalogs and sending their sales-force out to impress the publisher's enthusiasm on their accounts.

Even the advance can be a way to signal the trade: when a publisher announces that it just acquired a book for an eyebrow-raising sum, it's not trumpeting the size of its capital reserves – it's telling the trade that this book is a Big Deal that they should pay attention to.

(Of all the signals, this one may be the weakest, even if it's the most expensive for publishers to send. Take the $1.25m advance that Rupert Murdoch's Harpercollins paid to Sarah Palin for her unreadable memoir, Going Rogue. As with so many of the outsized sums Murdoch's press and papers pay to right wing politicians, the figure didn't represent a bet on the commercial prospects of the book – which tanked – but rather, a legal way to launder massive cash transfers from the far-right billionaire to a generation of politicians who now owe him some rather expensive favors.)

All of which brings me to the New York Times bestselling book Read Write Own by the billionaire VC New York Times Bestselling Author Chris Dixon. Dixon is a partner at A16Z, the venture capitalists who pumped billions into failed, scammy, cryptocurrency companies that tricked normies into converting their perfectly cromulent "fiat" money into shitcoins, allowing the investors to turn a massive profit and exit before the companies collapsed or imploded.

Read Write Own (subtitle: "Building the Next Era of the Internet") is a monumentally unconvincing hymn to the blockchain. As Molly White writes in her scathing review, the book is full of undisclosed conflicts of interest, with Dixon touting companies he has a direct personal stake in:

https://www.citationneeded.news/review-read-write-own-by-chris-dixon/

But this book's defects go beyond this kind of sleazy pump-and-dump behavior. It's also just bad. The arguments it makes for the blockchain as a way of escaping the problems of an enshittified, monopolized internet are bad arguments. White dissects each of these arguments very skillfully, and I urge you to read her review for a full list, but I'll reproduce one here to give you a taste:

After three chapters in which Dixon provides a (rather revisionistd) history of the web to date, explains the mechanics of blockchains, and goes over the types of things one might theoretically be able to do with a blockchain, we are left with "Part Four: Here and Now", then the final "Part Five: What's Next". The name of Part Four suggests that he will perhaps lay out a list of blockchain projects that are currently successfully solving real problems.

This may be why Part Four is precisely four and a half pages long. And rather than name any successful projects, Dixon instead spends his few pages excoriating the "casino" projects that he says have given crypto a bad rap,e prompting regulatory scrutiny that is making "ethical entrepreneurs … afraid to build products" in the United States.f

As White says, this is just not a good book. It doesn't contain anything to excite people who are already blockchain-poisoned crypto cultists – and it also lacks anything that will convince normies who never let Matt Damon or Spike Lee convince them to trade dollars for magic beans. It's one of those books that manages to be both paper and a paperweight.

And yet…it's a New York Times Bestseller. How did this come to pass? Here's a hint: remember how the Scientologists got L Ron Hubbard 20 consecutive #1 Bestsellers?

As Jordan Pearson writes for Motherboard, Read Write Own earned its place on the Times list because of a series of massive bulk orders from firms linked to A16Z and Dixon, which ordered between dozens and thousands of copies and gave them away to employees or just randos on Twitter:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7emkx/chris-dixon-a16z-read-write-own-nyt-bestseller

The Times recognizes this in a backhanded way, by marking Read Write Own on the list with a "dagger" (†) that indicates the shenanigans (the same dagger appeared alongside the listing for Donald Trump Jr's Triggered after the RNC spent a metric scientologyload of money – $100k – buying up cases of it):

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/21/books/donald-trump-jr-triggered-sales.html

There's a case for the Times not automatically ignoring bulk orders. Since 2020, I've run Kickstarters where I've pre-sold my books on behalf of my publisher, working with bookstores like Book Soup and wholesalers like Porchlight Books to backers when they go on sale. I signed and personalized 500+ books at Vroman's yesterday for backers who pre-ordered my next novel, The Bezzle:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/53531243480/

But there's a world of difference between pre-orders that hundreds or thousands of readers place that are aggregated into a single bulk order, and books that are bought by CEOs to give away to people who may not have any interest in them. For the book trade – librarians, reviewers, booksellers – the former indicates broad interest that justifies their attention. The latter just tells you that a handful of deep-pocketed manipulators want you to think there's broad interest.

I'm certain that Dixon – like me – feels a bit of pride at having "earned" a new first name. But Dixon – like me – gets something far more tangible than a bit of egoboo out of making the Times list. For me, a place on the Times list is a way to get booksellers and librarians excited about sharing my book with readers.

For Dixon, the stakes are much higher. Remember that cryptocurrency is a faith-based initiative whose mechanism is: "convince normies that shitcoins will be worth more tomorrow than they are today, and then trade them the shitcoins that cost you nothing to create for dollars that they worked hard to earn."

In other words, crypto is a bezzle, defined by John Kenneth Galbraith as "The magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it."

So long as shitcoins haven't fallen to zero, the bag-holders who've traded their "fiat" for funny money can live in the bezzle, convinced that their "investments" will recover and turn a profit. More importantly, keeping the bezzle alive preserves the possibility of luring in more normies who can infuse the system with fresh dollars to use as convincers that keep the bag-holders to keep holding that bag, rather than bailing and precipitating the zeroing out of the whole scam.

The relatively small sums that Dixon and his affiliated plutocrats spent to flood your podcasts with ads for this pointless 300-page Ponzi ad are a bargain, as are the sums they spent buying up cases of the book to give away or just stash in a storeroom. If only a few hundred retirees are convinced to convert their savings to crypto, the resulting flush of cash will make the line go up, allowing whales like Dixon and A16Z to cash out, or make more leveraged bets, or both. Crypto is a system with very few good trades, but spending chump change to earn a spot on the Times list (dagger or no) is a no-brainer.

After all, the kinds of people who buy crypto are, famously, the kinds of people who think books are stupid ("I would never read a book" -S Bankman-Fried):

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/11/29/sam-bankman-fried-reading-effective-altruism/

There's precious little likelihood that anyone will be convinced to go long on crypto thanks to the words in this book. But the Times list has enough prestige to lure more suckers into the casino: "I'm not going to read this thing, but if it's on the list, that means other people must have read it and think it's convincing."

We are living through a golden age of scams, and crypto, which has elevated caveat emptor to a moral virtue ("not your wallet, not your coins"), is a scammer's paradise. Stein's Law tells us that "anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop," but the purpose of a bezzle isn't to keep the scam going forever – just until the scammer can cash out and blow town. The longer the bezzle goes on for, the richer the scammer gets.

Not for nothing, my next novel – which comes out on Feb 20 – is called The Bezzle. It stars Marty Hench, my hard-driving, two-fisted, high-tech forensic accountant, who finds himself unwinding a whole menagerie of scams, from a hamburger-based Ponzi scheme to rampant music royalty theft to a vast prison-tech scam that uses prisoners as the ultimate captive audience:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865878/thebezzle

Patrick Nielsen Hayden – the same editor who gave me my new first name – once told me that "publishing is the act of connecting a text with an audience." Everything a publisher does – editing, printing, warehousing, distributing – can be separated from publishing. The thing a publisher does that makes them a publisher – not a printer or a warehouser or an editing shop – is connecting books and audiences.

Seen in this light, publishing is a subset of the hard problem of advertising, religion, politics and every other endeavor that consists in part of convincing people to try out a new idea:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/04/self-publishing/

This may be the golden age of scams, but it's the dark age of publishing. Consolidation in distribution has gutted the power of the sales force to convince booksellers to stock books that the publisher believes in. Consolidation in publishing – especially Amazon, which is both a publisher and the largest retailer in the country – has stacked the deck against books looking for readers and vice-versa (Goodreads, a service founded for that purpose, is now just another tentacle on the Amazon shoggoth). The rapid enshittification of social media has clobbered the one semi-reliable channel publicists and authors had to reach readers directly.

I wrote nine books during lockdown (I write as displacement activity for anxiety) which has given me a chance to see publishing in the way that few authors can: through a sequence of rapid engagements with the system as a whole, as I publish between one and three books per year for multiple, consecutive years. From that vantagepoint, I can tell you that it's grim and getting grimmer. The slots that books that connected with readers once occupied are now increasingly occupied by the equivalent of the botshit that fills the first eight screens of your Google search results: book-shaped objects that have gamed their way to the top of the list.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/03/botshit-generative-ai-imminent-threat-democracy

I don't know what to do about this, but I have one piece of advice: if you read a book you love, tell other people about it. Tell them face-to-face. In your groupchat. On social media. Even on Goodreads. Every book is a lottery ticket, but the bezzlers are buying their tickets by the case: every time you tell someone about a book you loved (and even better, why you loved it), you buy a writer another ticket.

Meanwhile, I've got to go get ready for my book tour. I'm coming to LA, San Francisco, Seattle, Vancouver, Calgary, Phoenix, Portland, Providence, Boston, New York City, Toronto, San Diego, Salt Lake City, Tucson, Chicago, Buffalo, as well as Torino and Tartu (details soon!).

If you want to get a taste of The Bezzle, here's an excerpt:

https://www.torforgeblog.com/2023/11/20/excerpt-reveal-the-bezzle-by-cory-doctorow/

And here's the audiobook, read by New York Times Bestselling Author Wil Wheaton:

https://archive.org/download/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_459/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_459_-_The_Bezzle_Read_By_Wil_Wheaton.mp3

#pluralistic #molly white #books #publishing #dunning kruggerands #crypto #cryptocurrency #a16z #venture capitalism #guillotine watch #this is why we can't have nice things #bookselling #the bezzle #bezzles #web3 #blockchain

[pumpk1n-writes]

Tell Me All About The Dark Places You Hide

➥ in which the reader figures out that their best friends are the infamous Woodsboro Killers and decides to help them rather than turn them in. {ft. stalking, in-depth descriptions of how the reader would murder someone, Billy uses “princess”, reader is a bit insane}

Part Two | Word Count ~ 720 (sorry, this one’s pretty short. The next few parts will be longer — this is more of an intro than an actual part and I was rushing to finish it)

The media you consume is your own responsibility and I will not be held accountable for your choices. I’m not going to block minors from this account, but proceed with caution anyway.

Taglist ~ @wasawattpadkid

It was a normal Friday night for you, some old black and white horror movie on, parents gone, and homework lying forgotten about on the kitchen counter.

The phone behind you rang and you groaned, leaving it for a few moments before getting up to answer. “Who’s this?”

Somebody on the other end — clearly using a voice changer — began speaking. “Do you like scary movies?”

“Eh. I enjoy them but the suspension of disbelief needed for most of them is too much.”

“Oh? What do you mean by that?”

“Well, for one, the way that the killers in a lot of them actually do it is disappointing. They hardly toy with their victims and just straight up kill them. There’s hardly any fear, it’s just a single moment of blood and gore before it’s over.”

Billy grinned underneath his Ghostface mask. “You’re an interesting girl, what’s your name?”

“You don’t need to know that right now. What’s your favorite color?”

Without thinking Billy answered. “Red.”

“Like blood?”

“Sure, princess. Like blood.”

“Princess?”

Billy smirked again. “Well if you’re not going to tell me your name I have to find something to call you. You got a boyfriend?”

“Oh god no. They’re all toxic little shits that don’t know how to act. Besides, it’s too messy to clean up their blood.”

A beat of silence then; “For legal reasons, that was a joke.”

And all of a sudden, you were a much more fascinating person than Billy had ever imagined you would be to him. He wanted to know everything about you, all your strange little habits and personality traits that made you the way you are, your daily schedule, what your blood looked like spilled over his blade and hands.

“Hello?”

“Don’t worry, princess, I’m still here. And I have more questions for you.”

“Well I’m getting kind of sleepy so hurry it up.”

Billy smiled to himself, using his binoculars to glance around your room. You sat up on your bed, playing with something he couldn’t see. You also — he noticed, blood pooling southward — were only wearing an oversized t-shirt.

“What would you do differently as the killer in those movies?” That wasn’t the question you’d expected. Maybe your favorite band or your least favorite food. Maybe your name again. But not how you would commit murder.

You thought for a moment, humming under your breath. “For one thing, I wouldn’t make it so obvious it was me. In a lot of those movies the audience is guessing who it is in the first five minutes. That wouldn’t be me. I’m pretty outgoing and bubbly around my friends anyway, so I wouldn’t really be a suspect. Plus, my friends say I’m wicked smart but no one can tell when they first meet me.”

Billy nodded to himself. That much was true. He would never have expected you, one of his classmates who sits next to him in English, to go so in depth on how not to get caught murdering people.

You kept going. “So I would play that up. Cry at any mention of my dead classmates, but not too much or it’ll get suspicious. I’d keep up the facade of ‘perfect student’ and act disgusted when anyone brings up how I killed them. That alone would help.”

Billy laughed. “You sound like you’ve thought about this a lot.” But secretly he was taking notes.

“Sorry, I get really bored sometimes, and this is just what my mind strays to.”

Really? This is what your sick, twisted mind thought up in your free time? He wondered how many times he’d glanced over at you in English and you were plotting his death, spaced out with a happy smile on your face.

“Keep going, princess.”

“Well that’s just how I wouldn’t get caught. The actual murders themselves I would make as grisly and gory as I could think of so people would think a sweet, innocent, ‘perfect’ girl could never commit them. I would maybe draw satanic symbols on the wall in their blood or something to throw off police. I would only kill crackheads or past criminals so that the police wouldn’t really care very much to solve it. And I would only kill weeks apart so that they don’t feel immediately threatened.”

“Jesus Christ,” Billy was mostly thinking to himself, but still. He was impressed.

He also thought he might be falling in love with you a little bit.

#poly!ghostface #poly!ghostface smut #angst #billy loomis #fluff #scream #scream 1996 #smut #series #fic #scream 1996 smut #billy loomis scream #stu matcher x reader #stu macher

[loverwebs]

It's Supposed to be Fun, Turning 21

Pairing: Peter Parker x Fem!Reader

Synopsis: Your boyfriend, Peter, doesn't make it to your birthday dinner. So you walk home alone, only to run into the friendly neighborhood Spider-Man.

Warnings: Slight angst & mentions of alcohol

Word count: 1,700

A very tired Y/n stumbled over the bumpy sidewalk of New York, cursing under her breath whenever she nearly stepped in a puddle. Her purse was crossed along her body and a bottle of wine swung from her hand.

She made her way home quickly and in annoyance, not wanting to be out any longer than she had to. With that in mind, she took a shortcut through an alleyway.

"Ma'am, stop right there!" A voice behind her shouted. She hesitantly turned, about to blow the person off, before she saw the city's masked hero within a few feet's distance.

"Holy shit! Oh, fuck did I do something? If it's the wine— I'm legally allowed to own it! And I have my ID, so please don't arrest me. I'm not even drunk!” a startled Y/n shouted.

"No, no! It’s okay," The vigilante approached her.

"Oh, okay," She said, touching her heart and sighing in relief. "Sorry for getting all jumpy there. It’s been a long day."

"No, you're fine! I didn't mean to scare you. I was just gonna say, you really shouldn't be walking home by yourself. It's not exactly safe, especially at night," He explained through an overly deepened voice.

"I know it's not," Sighed the girl. "My friends tried to get me to walk home with them, but my place isn't that far. And I'm really not in the mood to talk to anyone."

She continued her path, glancing back at him to add a quick, "No offense."

"None taken," He replied through a jog, catching up to her. "Did you just happen to be carrying around a bottle of wine with you, though?" He softly laughed at her antics.

"Uhh, yeah, just tonight." She returned a weak one.

"What's the occasion?" He asked, though he already knew the answer.

"It's my birthday. I'm 21 now and I wanna have my first drink with my boyfriend. He couldn't make it to my party and the restaurant let me bring one home with me."

She smiled sadly, lifting the bottle up so he could see the written For the birthday girl, enjoy! that a waitress had signed in permanent marker.

Peter felt guilty hearing this. Not only because he didn't make it to her birthday, but because she still waited for him. Wanting to share the special moment— despite him having missed it entirely.

"Happy birthday, then." The masked boy spoke, voice cracking as he said it. "I hope you spent it well."

"It was... eh. But thank you."

"Why was it 'eh'?" He asked, holding his breath.

"It's just, I don't know." She shrugged, not wanting to get into it.

She pondered for a moment, then, "I'm not trying to be rude or like, ungrateful, but don't you have actual Spider-Man stuff to do?"

He shook his head, "Making sure you get home safely is just as important as any other mission to me... plus, I wanted to make sure you were okay."

"That's nice, but I wouldn't want you to stop helping someone who actually needs it because of me."

"It's fine," He waved a hand in dismissal. "Don't even worry about it. I was pretty much done for the night anyway."

All she did was nod, not entirely convinced, then he spoke again.

"Sooo.. your birthday," He started.

"Right, yeah. It was fine, I guess."

"How come?"

"You're already walking me home, the last thing I want is for you to be my therapist too." She joked.

"Well, maybe I could help cheer you up... I like to help people. It's what I do."

"My friends already tried.. and failed. What makes you think you can?"

"I'd try my luck," He suggested. "Or we could walk in awkward silence."

She laughed at that, to which he said, "So what's got you down?"

"Okay, I mean.. like I said, my boyfriend didn't show up at the restaurant, soo I kinda spent the whole night staring at the door in case he did."

"Oh." He mumbled. "Sounds like a shitty boyfriend," He whispered, a little more to himself.

"He isn't," She shook her head a few too many times.

"He's naturally late to things, yeah. And he can't always make it to stuff. But when he is there.. His presence makes everything so much better." She said truthfully.

Peter hummed in understanding, his heart feeling heavy at her defending words. Here he was in a Spider-Man suit, meanwhile she wore her best party outfit. Not even cursing at the boy for his absence.

He didn't deserve her, he thought.

"Did he at least call? You know, saying he couldn't make it?"

Silence filled the air momentarily, which was enough of an answer. Still, she said, "He usually does..."

"Yeah?" He swallowed the forming lump in his throat.

"He— he always lets me know if he can't. And he did wish me a Happy Birthday! It's just— he's— I don't know what's going on with him anymore." She gave a teary laugh.

"Sometimes, it just feels like he's gonna break up with me. I feel like he wants to do it, but he's waiting around for the perfect opportunity, y'know?" She quickly wiped her now forming tears. "Sorry, I sound really pathetic."

"What?! No. No... You don't." He paused. "You— you really think he's gonna break up with you?" He dreadfully asked.

"I don't know," She gave a weak shrug. "He's like, distant lately."

"Have you.. Have you tried talking to him about it?"

"I've tried, yeah." She chewed on her lip nervously, thinking of the many instances where he canceled at the last minute when she intended on speaking with him.

"Like just this week, I asked to meet up after his afternoon class because I wanted to know if something was wrong, but..." She trailed off, holding back more tears.

"He canceled," He finished her sentence, wincing at her confirming nod.

"Right, and it's like, what am I doing wrong?" She added helplessly.

"Nothing! You're not doing anything wrong," He said through an interior panic.

"Doesn't feel like it."

They continued walking as Peter thought of the correct words to say. She'd laid her thoughts right there at his feet and he didn't know what the right move was.

He gave a desperate sigh, then proceeded to say, "I don't think he wants to break up with you."

"Seriously? That's what you're gonna tell me? You don't know that—"

"Hear me out... It's just, you know. Maybe he has a lot going on and.." He started, feeling overwhelmed.

"And maybe he hasn't been able to really tell you everything he wants you to know because he's scared. Scared to lose you. Or scared that you're already slipping away from him." He rambled on.

She slowed down her pace, tilting her head at him as a sense of familiarity within his words settled in.

He wasn't faking his tone anymore, and she wasn't as in her head as she was when he first found her.

"But you're not doing anything wrong, okay, Y/n?" He continued, voice breaking as he stepped closer to her. "I can promise you that."

She looked around to make sure the streets were empty before abruptly stopping in her tracks, eyeing him, when it finally clicked for her. She inched closer to him, while her shaky fingers tentatively reached towards the bottom of his mask.

She did so slowly, making sure he had time to stop her if he wanted to.

"Wait," He put his hand over hers. "It's not really.. It's not safe to do that here."

She understood and immediately withdrew her hand, taking a few steps back.

"Do you trust me?" He walked towards her, carefully placing his hands on her hips. With a nod, she wrapped her arms around his neck.

Just like that, he aimed at a nearby building and shot a web, swinging with her in his arms. Her body tightly hugged him as they made their way to the rooftop of Peter's old apartment building. The same place they had their first date.

A sloppy "Happy Birthday" was webbed above the projector that was setup, along with blankets on an old couch that they’d made out on several times.. A few of her favorite drinks and snacks placed there as well. She noticed them as he gently put her down.

She once again turned to look at him, but his mask was already off.

"I'm sorry I missed your birthday, Princess."

"Oh, Peter," She frowned and went to cup his face. "Who did this to you?"

"It doesn't matter," He said softly, leaning into her hands.

"I'm so sorry I didn't tell you sooner. I really wanted to... But I never knew when or how to do it. And tonight, I wanted to be there." His lips trembled.

"You have no idea how much I wanted to be there. But some guy had this really wonderful idea to rob a bank on your day, which caused a lockdown and eventually it led to a car pileup—"

She placed a kiss on his lips, shutting him up while holding onto the back of his neck in order to keep him close.

"I saw the news, Pete." She said once they parted and hugged him tightly, body shaking as she did so.

"Are you crying?" He asked through furrowed brows. "I'm so sorry I upset you, I—"

"I'm not upset with you. You don't have to apologize."

"You're not?"

"I mean, I was upset when I thought you were preparing some 'it's not you, it's me' speech on my birthday. And the thought of that hurts a lot more than knowing you kept this from me."

"I shouldn't have ever made you feel like we were gonna breakup, I'm sorry. I really didn't mean to give you that impression. You have every right to be upset at me for it." He hung his head low in shame.

"Thank you for owning up to it, but it's okay now, love. I'm okay now that you're here," She reassured him. "And I'm really glad you trusted me enough to share this with me."

"Of course I trust you. I had it all planned out.. We were supposed to go to dinner first and then come here. I was gonna explain everything up here, but things just got all messy, as always."

"I just said it's okay," She giggled, tracing the spider on his chest. "Besides, I can't complain when you look this good in your suit."

She smiled at his forming blush and messed up hair, then leaned in to kiss him once again.

"I love you," He whispered against her lips.

"I love you too, Spider-Man."

#peter parker #peter parker x reader #peter parker x you #peter parker fluff #peter parker imagine #peter parker oneshot #tom holland #tom holland x reader #tom holland x you #tom holland imagine #spiderman #spiderman x you #spiderman x reader #spiderman fanfiction #spiderman fic #peter parker fanfiction #peter parker fic #peter parker x y/n #tom holland fanfiction #tom holland x y/n #tom holland fic

[sinofwriting]

kisses on rings for oscar/reader/ logan please!!!

like in my head -> childhood besties turned lovers -> knows they cant be together publicly or ever get married because poly so they have promise rings but everyone thinks theyre friendship rings -> maybe during the vegas gp they all ask the elvis impersonaters in the paddock to "jokingly" marry the three of them -> cue the you may now kiss and they all end up kissing everyone laughs it off -> but them three know thats the closest they can be to being together so the kisses on their rings are them sharing kisses in public with actually kissing

Title: Closest We Can Get Words: 677 Prompt: Kisses on rings w/ Oscar/Reader/Logan

Also, just realized I completely forgot the prompt, I'm sorry.

Taglist | Masterlist | Patreon

“It’s so sweet.” She raises an eyebrow, taking her eyes off Logan and Oscar who are joking around with an Elvis impersonator, to look at Lily. “What’s so sweet?” “Your guys' friendship rings, I mean really. I’ve never seen three friends so close and the friendship rings are a sweet touch.” “Oh, thank you.” She still wasn’t entirely sure how to interact with anyone else on the grid, always sticking to Oscar and Logan.

Especially considering the fact that none of them knew the truth. She wasn’t just Logan and Oscar’s childhood friend or bestfriend that made the duo a trio, but rather their girlfriend. And that the friendship rings the three wore weren’t friendship rings but rather faux wedding rings.

Logan had offered to let Oscar and her go public together, but she didn’t want to go public with just Oscar. Which then made Oscar then offer for Logan and her to go public, and it ended up with her telling both of them that no one was going public. Poly relationships weren’t a thing with their lifestyle and Logan and Oscar were both too new to this to be making the boat rock with something considered unconventional.

And then somehow the conversation had ended up with her crying as she realized she’d never be able to marry them, because she’d only be able to marry one of them and she didn’t want that, had never wanted that. For the three of them, it had never just been a matter of wanting one or the other, it had always been wanting both.

It was because of that conversation and the realization that they all wanted to marry each other that now they had what everyone believed to be friendship rings.

Her name being called makes her look back at her boyfriends and she laughs seeing the flush on their cheeks and their large grins, the three shots they had finally seemed to hit them.

“What?” She calls, not moving away from Lily, Lando, Alex, Charles, and Max. “Elvis says he’ll marry us!” Logan tells her, smiling as he waves her over. She looks at the Elvis impersonator between the two and has to stifle a laugh at how excited he looks as well. “I’m not marrying you, Logan!” She calls back as the whole group laughs at her denial and the way his face drops before perking back up. “But it’s me and Oscar. You’ll get to marry the both of us!” He reasons and she can feel herself giving in. Because she knows it’s not real, not legal in any way, but it doesn’t stop her from wanting it. So, with a sigh she leaves the group of drivers as both Oscar and Logan cheer.

The two immediately wrap themselves around her and she doesn’t notice the way everyone had followed her, to watch as the three got friendship married.

She doesn’t really register the weird vows from Elvis or the laughs from the drivers and Lily as they watch, she just looks at her boyfriends. At the excited glint in their eyes, how they both keep squeezing her hand.

“I now pronounce you, husband, husband, and wife!” He declares, before adding. “And thank you, thank you very much.” She laughs at the look on Oscar’s face at the impersonator’s words, but is kissed before she can say anything. It’s quick, just a little longer than a peck and then Logan is darting forward to do the same to Oscar and she follows in Logan’s footsteps, pressing a quick kiss to Oscar’s lip as well.

The three stare at each other after as the other drivers whoop and holler, joking about how none of them would have thought it’d be Logan and Oscar getting hitched in Vegas. They had known this would be difficult, never getting to kiss each other in public, or being careful about not hugging or holding hands for too long, but now after kissing in public for the first time, the same thought is going through all of their heads: again.

@teti-menchon0604 @darleneslane @crystals-faith @andreea-15-25 @benstormy @eugene-emt-roe @skepvids @elliegrey2803

#f1 imagine #formula 1 imagine #f1 x reader #formula 1 x reader #oscar piastri x reader x logan sargeant #loscar x reader

[pigeonpeach]

Be my muse

Chiori x fem oni reader

Summary: Chiori is trying to court her big oni friend but they’re too insecure to realize it.

A/n: I’ll be doing more fem oni x character series simply because its fun. But if there’s a certain character you’d like then let me know

“Hmm… maybe this blue would match your horns better.” Chiori, the renowned stylist in Inazuma had you stood on a pedestal standing straight as she threw at you a variety of kimonos and yukatas to wear. As a blue oni you weren’t accustomed to human society to well. Fashion isn’t really a big deal to Oni kind.. like at all… in fact most oni’s only wear thick and concealing garments in the winter. Most walk around with their chests exposed. As a blue oni you were also used to the scrutiny that you faced. Being considered a monster, a demon. All sorts of names.

Yet when you ran into Chiori one day while you were collecting lavender melons she seemed not to even consider you any different to herself. Even if you did tower over her, she showed zero fear. You couldn’t help but admire her as she would visit your hut in the wilderness on Narukami Island frequently. She was curious about your culture and your family but also your style. Turns out she HATED your pratical and unfashionable wardrobe and sought to make something better. According to her it is a crime that you decorate yourself with such hideous clothes. You foolishly challenged her to make something better than.

That’s thing about Chiori, she loves a challenge. Chiori loves to go outside the normal kimono patterns and flowing fabrics. She loves to experiment and draw inspiration from all over teyvat. So when you challenged her to make a outfit suited both for the life of a mercenary and a oni that still fits her stands of beautiful she saw a golden opportunity. You didn’t even have to pay a cent, but you did become her mannequin for the next few months.

“Look, Chiori I didn’t think you would take that joke so seriously.” You said as she placed yet another mock up on you. “I’m worried… shouldn’t you be making prettier dresses for your store?”

“You know its not like I’m wasting time. I’m still balancing my normal workload. Infact this is good because the more variety I can have the more attention I’ll bring.” She responds, not even looking up as she sews a piece to the slev

“I don’t think people look at mercenaries and wonder where they got their clothes.”

“They would if more mercenaries didn’t dress so hideously.” She remarks.

“Well..-“

“Don’t give me that practicality argument I’ve hear it all before. I’ve offered you a job as my assistant to which is significantly less dangerous.”

“My job isn’t that dangerous. I can handle the treasure hoarders and hilichurls with ease.”

“I don’t want you too though.” She says, you sense something different with her tone as she stitches a hole she spotted shut. Her hands moving the string as a spider weaves its web. It appears you’re too entangled in her strings to leave so easily now.

“I-I appreciate that.” You say. “But being your assistant would be difficult. I can’t travel with you..” you frown as you remember how she mentioned how she wanted to leave inazuma. You cannot however, being a Oni you were far removed from society especially In it’s paperwork. You have no travel papers or birth certificate because you born in a clan of Onis who saw no reason for such documents, your birth wasn’t officially registered with the Inazuma government as many others were. Which means you can’t legally travel outside of Inazuma. That’s what the lady in Ritou said at least.

“I’d stay if you wanted me too.” She said, her hands stopped their work as she looked up at you with a look that made you melt. “You’re beautiful you know, beyond your pretty face and soft hair… you’re far from what they say about you. You’re not a brute, you’re not even cruel, you have the biggest heart I’ve seen.” You can’t help but blush. She’s rarely as sweet as she is now.

“I don’t want to hold you back. You deserve to see the world, and I don’t want you to be stuck here.”

“If you could… would you go with me?” She asks. You pause. Leaving Inazuma would be a privilege. You only heard tales of the other nations and what it was like. You only saw a few trinkets from the other nations. What would it be like to feel the wind in Mondstadt, or to go swimming in Fontaine, supposedly you could breathe underwater. You’ve heard endless praise of the dishes in Liyue from the merchants you helped to escort. You even got to try one and you found they weren’t exaggerating. Perhaps you just never allowed yourself to dream of actually going there because you doubted that would ever be real.

“I would love to.” You say. “To explore the world with you would be a pleasure.”

Silence falls between you as you tense up. Did that freak her out? You weren’t sure if she was into you or not. Oni customs are quite different. You had read about human customs sure but you still couldn’t tell. She pulls away gesturing for you to spin around. You do.

“That Lady in Ritou.. she’s the one who told you that you couldn’t leave right?” She asked. You felt concerned, It wasn’t unlike Chiori to be a bit vindictive if she felt upset at someone.

“Yes, what did you do to her?”

“Well I had a word with her, and I found out she was full of it. You can easily file for a birth certificate as long as your parents come with you to testify its correct. It just costs a bit of mora.” She says going back to sewing.

“Yes I’m aware of that too. Its why I started my Mercenary career.”

“I could pay for it… save your money for the ticket out of here. Those government officals love to overcharge. Someone like you seems easy to fool. You’re too kind to them.”

“To be fair I have to be. If I’m even slightly mean or angry they act like I’m going on a rampage. My behaviors don’t just affect how they perceive me, but my entire species. I have to be calm otherwise they won’t even give me a chance.” You lament.

“I’ll be mean then, you know I have a bite to me. They can’t say anything if its me pushing on your behalf.” She says with a mischievous smile.

“But it could ruin your reputation.” You say

“With who? I could care less what they think of me. Those kind of people aren’t worth a cent of my time anyways.” She say’s confidently. “People don’t ask. Fashion designer to be their friend they ask a fashion designer to make them look good infront of their friends.” You smile as she again shuts down your worries about her. You’re not used to this. You’re used to fighting and arguing just to prove you have heart. You’re used to beans being tossed and always having to give a second chance when they realize they were wrong. You try to be understanding, you try to be otherwise you’ll be seen as unreasonable. But Chiori isn’t like that. She once kicked out a customer because they screamed at you throwing beans when you were just bringing her textiles in. She yelled at how disrespectful they were to her staff and that they wouldn’t ever be welcomed in her shop.

“Hey. Stop overthinking.” She smacked your face guiding you to look down. In your thoughts she moved to your front to start tying your custom obi.

“I’m not overthinking this time actually… i was just thinking about something.”

“If anyone in the outside world is threatened by you I’ll correct their assumptions. You really need to let me help you here.”

“Actually… i was just thinking about you…” you say, her eyes widen slightly, a rare sight as her confident frown is replaced with confusion. “You… thank you Chiori… I-I’m just..not used to someone like yourself…” you smile as she shakes her head briefly before regaining her composure.

“Its really not that big of a deal. Now, tell me.. did I surpass your expectations?” She says moving out of the way so you can see your new outfit in the mirror. You smile, not because its the most beautiful you’ve ever felt for a woman your size, but because she looks at you like you are one. Your confidence is boosted by the clear pride she exhibits in it.

“Even better than I could’ve imagined.” You say. She raises her head in pride.

“Well good, I can get started on the others now.”

“Wait what?”

“Well, you don’t expect to travel teyvat with only one fancy garment do you?”

#genshin imagines #genshin x y/n #chiori #chiori x reader #oni reader #wlw #wlw post

[lesvii]

Your Valeria Garza Buchifresa Girlfriend Headcannon 🍓

This is mostly some hc that I have of Valeria cause I’m tired of no one doing a buchifresa lesbian cause I am one… and I’m tired of ppl saying I want a buchón while all I want is a buchona (Valeria)😩..

• You knew Valeria on a club in México Sinaloa, you were partying with some of your friends while some big guys enter the club, you saw a woman enter behind them, as you whisper to your friends who might they be, which cartel do they work from?. Either way minutes pass and you forgot about them.

•You were wearing a pink top, with a white short skirt, some white high heels and your long black hair.

•You were having your best night singing the corridos on the club with your friends when you decided to sit on the table you guys had at the club, just for a few minutes, you grabbed your phone to see any text notifications as you look up to see the waitress telling you they send you a tequila bottle one of the expensive ones, as this was not new for you, you were used to men sending you free drinks, but now you didn’t want to deal with them, but hey! a free drink is a free drink. You smiled at the waitress as you ask her clueless who was the guy that send you the bottle, as the waitress fills you a tequila shot, she mentions the table in front of yours, a few feet away. “It was the woman with the black top and tattoos” she mentioned, as you look confused, you look up to search for the woman as she smirks at you and holds her glass, you do the same as you smiled at her, your cheeks slightly blush.

•From that moment on the night just started, you wanted to go on her table and thanks her personally for the free drink but something about her having like 5 bodyguards surrounding the table made you actually think she might be from some cartel. Your friends teased you all night long telling you to go on and talk to her, as you finally got courage to do it, “fine! Fine! I’ll do it but I’m going to the bathroom first, I need to touch up my makeup” you said as you rolled your eyes and smiled playfully. You got separated from your friends and you enter the bathroom, you put some lipstick on, brushed your hair with your hands as you were about to exit the bathroom when Valeria enters. “Pero si estás preciosa” Valeria said, as you turn away to look at her you blush “Thanks”. You said and from that on you stay on Valeria table as your friends went crazy looking at you.

•Valeria can and WILL spoil you often with luxurious hand bags, LV, Gucci, Prada, Channel etc. She loves to doll you up and after all it all came with a “prize”…

•You didn’t talk much about your relationship since you knew her work wasn’t specially legal, still you didn’t know (at the beginning) she was a cartel leader.

•You love watching narco series/novelas but Valeria despises them she thinks they aren’t something to joke about it made her work look ridiculous.

•You were her trophy wife when it came to have big meetings with other cartel leaders as they brought their wives too.

#el sin nombre #valeria garza #valeria garza cod #cod #valeria garza x fem!reader #lesbian #call of duty #call of duty valeria #cod fanfic #cod modern warfare

[anniemika]

Chocolate kisses

Eren Jaeger x Female Reader

Summary: You decide to surprise your best friend, Eren, for his birthday, and the night takes an unexpected turn.

Words: 2.5k

…..

“Happy birthday, Eren!” 

You grin at the tall boy in front of you, his confused eyes on yours as you hold the delicious-smelling birthday cake in front of his sleepy face.

It’s his 21st birthday today, and you, being his best friend, wanted to surprise him at his dorm at exactly 12 a.m. with your special three way chocolate cake that you’d spend the last 3 hours making.

His hair is tasseled and he looks like he just woke up, but that doesn’t stop him from giving you the warmest smile ever. He leans down, blowing the candles you’d lit, relishing in the sweet giggles that fall out of your lips.

“You didn’t have to do that.” He leans against the doorframe, taking the cake from your hands. “Thank you, Y/n.”

“You’re very welcome, legal boy”, you coo, excitedly swaying from one foot to the other, “can I come in?”

“Oh, shit, yeah, sorry”, he moves from the door and you make your way in, noticing his roommate isn’t there. 

“Where’s Armin?” You walk around the dim lit room, with Eren walking behind you, putting the cake on the nearby coffee table. 

“With Annie I think.”

“You’re celebrating alone? Eren, you shoulda called me.”

He lets out a low laugh, “Wasn’t exactly celebrating, more like trying to catch up on sleep.”

“Shit, I’m sorry”, you bite your inner lip, feeling a bit embarrassed for waking him up. 

“No, no, it’s alright. I’m really glad you came.”

You send him a smile, moving to sit on the little couch in the middle of the room. 

“It’s my specialty, you know.” You cheekily say, nodding to the delicious-looking cake in front of you.

“Yeah?” He moves to sit next to you, dipping a finger in the chocolate frosting and licking it clean.

You can’t really read his eyes in the darkened room, so your heart skips a beat when a few seconds pass by without him saying anything. “Verdict?”

He turns to you, flashing you his pearly white teeth. “Best fucking cake I’ve ever had.”

Your eyes sparkle with joy, “Really?”

“Yeah, really.” He stands to get plates, a knife, and two forks from the kitchen, then cuts the biggest piece possible, sitting back next to you. “Open up.”

He swings an enormous bite straight to your mouth, and you yelp. “Eren, that’s huge!”

He fights the urge to make a “that’s what she said” joke, chuckling while feeding you. “This ain’t a small bite cake.”

He watches as you chew with delight, the pride apparent on your features. “It’s sooo good.”

He nods and goes for a second bite when a chocolate stain right below your lip catches his attention. 

“You have a little..”, he stares, and you’re looking at him confused until he gently swipes his finger across your lip. The touch takes you by surprise, and when you take in Eren’s gaze, you feel a flush form on your cheeks. He’s so pretty, even when he’s just gotten out of bed, wearing the sponge Bob pj’s you bought him for his last birthday. 

“Uhm, thanks.” You say, and it takes a few seconds for Eren’s lingering stare to move onto the cake in front of him.

“Y-yeah, sure.”

There’s a short silence that settles, one that you break when you grab your purse and start rummaging through it. 

“I, uh.. got you something.”

He’s instantly turning to give you a scolding look. “Y/n-“

“I know, I know, can we skip this part? I wanted to and I got you something.. I hope you like it.”

You slowly pull the CD from your bag, sheepishly handing it to him. The moment Eren realises what your hands are holding, his eyes pop.

“No fucking way.”

He grabs it and starts inspecting it thoroughly, mouth falling agape. “Are you shitting me right now!?”

“Nope. It’s signed by all the members, and that right there is Kurt’s.”

He’s flipping the Nirvana album in his hands, staring at it like it’s not real. “Y/n, you shouldn’t have done this. It must’ve cost a fucking fortune.”

“Eren, it’s okay. I made a good deal, and besides, this is also your Christmas present, so it’s fine.” You’re chuckling but when you catch his eyes, and the intensity with which they’re looking at you, you gulp.

“Eren?”

It happens so fast, you don’t have any time to process it. But you sure felt it. His lips on yours, the gentle kiss they gifted you, and the way your whole body stiffened in surprise. And now, Eren’s lingering breath is just inches away from yours, and there’s no courage in your heart to look up at his eyes. 

“Shit”, he starts, his actions dawning on him, “shit, I’m sorry.”

You’re frozen, heart beating in your throat. 

“Y/n, I’m-“, he’s panicking, “I’m sorry, I don’t know why I did that.”

And you’re just as quick as him, just barely pressing your mouth against his like it’s your first kiss, then quickly pulling away, shocked at yourself. 

Then, silence. It’s suffocatingly loud, and downright insufferable because neither of you are moving a muscle, as if scared that if you do, your actions would become realer than they already are. 

You slowly turn away from him and put your hands on your lap, head down in embarrassment.

“I-“

“I’m-“

You both start, and it feels like someone’s removed all the oxygen from the room.

“Well, that was awkward.” You get the courage to say, your nervous laugh ringing in his ears. 

“Yeah, I just.. got really happy, I guess.” You catch the way his hand scratches nervously at the back of his neck, a habit he’s had ever since you were kids. 

“You have a real way of showing it.” You bite your lip in an attempt not to laugh, although it wouldn’t be because you find any of this funny but because of the nerves eating away at your insides. 

“Oh shut up, you kissed me back!” Eren snaps at you playfully, gently throwing a cushion pillow your way.

“I- I was surprised! I wasn’t- I didn’t mean to.” You’re stuttering, and he understands because if you could get a glimpse of what’s inside his brain right now, you’d find a total, awkward mess. He doesn’t let it show though, trying to keep you from finding out just how nervous both of your actions have made him.

“Yeah, let’s just.. forget about it.” 

You don’t expect it to sting that much when he says it but you guess it really didn’t mean much to him if he could brush it off that easily. 

“..Yeah, okay.”

Another silence settles between you, hundreds of thoughts running through your mind until Eren plants his hand on your shoulder, the contact making you flinch. 

“Hey”, his tone is gentle, inducing a tiny shiver down your spine, “thank you for this. It’s the best gift I’ve ever gotten.”

You gather the strength to look at him, trying to keep your overwhelming feelings in check. 

“You’re welcome, ‘Ren”

And there you go again, with that nickname and that infectious smile, making him forget what earth he’s on. 

Eren’s always liked you. Maybe he didn’t understand to what extent when you were younger, but he’s always been very protective of you, and given the fact you’re the person he loves spending his time most in the world, he shouldn’t have been so surprised when his instinct was to kiss you 2 minutes ago. You’re just always so kind to him, so caring, always there for him when things get tough, that it’s not at all surprising that somewhere between the time of being a kid and a reckless teenager whose wounds you’d always patch up, he’d fallen for you.

And even now, you’re treating his birthday like this huge deal when it doesn’t even mean that much to him. And that makes him love you even more. 

He doesn’t want to push himself onto you though because in his mind, you’re probably just thinking of him as a friend, and wouldn’t be too open to the idea of having a relationship with him. But boy, is he wrong. 

The taste of his chocolaty lips lingers on yours, and you’re still too lost in thought when he gets up and starts talking to you about just how much he loves his gift. He notices you’re staring into nothing, and of course, a slight panic comes over him because what if he’s really fucked things up? His mind is quickly trying to work out a solution for this mess, wondering how to fix the situation when he realises you’ve moved from the couch and are now standing in front of his face.

“Why’d you kiss me?” You barely have the strength to look at him, but still, you ball your fist and stare up at his forest greens.

“I told you-“

“I don’t believe you.”

Shit, shit, shit-

He laughs nervously, “Y/n, it was nothing, I said I was sorry, I mean.. why’d you kiss me back?”

The inside of your cheek starts hurting when you realize you’ve been chewing at it way too hard, your skin burning from the inside out, “I don’t know, I..”, your hearts on the verge of exploding, “I wanted to.”

Oh.

“..what?”, Eren’s tone makes you even more nervous, but you try to ignore the uncomfortable feeling it brings you.

“I do- did! I did.” You can hear your pulse like your heart is stuck to a machine, your palms are sweaty, and this all feels like a dream, one that might turn into a nightmare if Eren continues to just stare down at you with the perplexed look he has on his face. 

“Aren’t you gonna say something?” You can barely recognize your voice, so weak and fragile, as opposed to how it usually sounds. You guess given the situation, it’s good you can still even talk. 

“Huh?” Eren looks so lost, you debate if he’s even processing your words properly. 

“Y-you don’t have to, it’s just..”, you fidget with your fingers, casting your eyes down at your feet, “I kind of.. just confessed I wanted to kiss you, so..”

And no matter how many times you say those words, to Eren, they would still feel too good to be true. He knows he has to say something, or else you might run out of here and never speak to him again. 

“I, uh..”, come on, you idiot, “I’m glad you did.”

You shoot your sparkling eyes up, and before he can lose himself in them and their pretty colour, he continues, “I wanted to kiss you, too. I’ve wanted to for a long time.”

Relief washes over you in an instant, but you don’t let yourself get too happy, only letting a quiet “oh” as acknowledgment.

“Yeah, so..”, he’s scratching at his neck again, “I guess that’s that.” He chuckles nervously, but you’re not reciprocating. Instead, you tippy-toe on your toes, your palms on either sides of his face, and then gently plant your lips on his again. It’s soft, and sweet, and pure, just like your feelings for him. The feelings you’ve always been too scared to admit, the ones you’d hidden away inside your heart, that are now finally emerging free. 

You know you’ve taken him by surprise when you reach for his hand, his muscles tense, but you don’t need to open your eyes to know that his are closed, taking this moment in, and appreciating it just as much as you are. 

When the kiss ends, you’re still holding his hand, locking your eyes with his wide ones. 

“I guess that’s that.”

Eren’s never been too good at controlling himself.

He whisks you away in his arms, falling back on the couch with you on his lap, his lips searching for yours in a state of pure bliss, his eagerness sending tingles through your body. You’ve never been so happy in your life. You’ve dreamed this, wanted this for the longest time but having it happen right now feels unreal. Your best friend, your Eren, he wants you. Like a man wants a woman. And it feels fucking amazing.

Eren’s kisses take your breath away. They’re tender but also needy, like he’s been holding himself back for so long and can now finally express just how much he likes you. And he does. It’s in the way he holds the back of your head, his fingers gently going through your hair. In the way he softly grips your arm, ensuring you stay right where you are. And it’s in the way he sighs into your lips while he kisses you, like it’s what he’s dreamed of his entire life.

“Wait,”, you don’t expect him to be the first to break contact, and when he does, your eyes are still focused on his lips, “is this- I mean, what does this mean?”

Well.. what does this mean? You’re not entirely sure yourself, but you’ve got a pretty close idea.

Gathering enough air in your lungs, you then presume to say, “I like doing this, Eren.. with you.”

‘Breathe’ is the only word Eren recognises in his brain right now.

“But.. our friendship-“ 

“I know.” You’re quick to silence him, knowing well enough what he’s about to say, “But.. if we don’t try-” Shit, is there a right way to say this? Trying your best to stay calm and think clearly given the situation, you cup his flustered face, “What I mean is, I don’t want this to be a one time thing. Now that we’ve crossed the line, there’s no coming back from it.”

Eren’s looking at you all red and breathless, his hold on you firm. 

“I don’t want to forget these kisses, Eren. To forget how it feels doing this with you.” You continue, amazed at your bravery to say the things you thought you’d never have the courage to, “I don’t.. want to do this with anyone else. If you don’t want to either, then.. we can try.”

Seconds that feel like years pass by with your eyes staring at one another, the heavy atmosphere weighing on both of you. That is until Eren’s forehead rests against yours, his breath caressing your swollen lips.

“Yeah.” It’s quick and you almost miss it before his lips find yours again, “Yes.” He repeats, this time more firmly. “Fuck yes.” 

You grin into his mouth, and he playfully bites your lower lip in return. He readjust’s your position so both of your legs are on either sides of him, his hands resting on your hips. There’s a slight change on his face, the boost of confidence you sense in him sending heat to your cheeks.

“We can try as many times as you want to.”

Gulp. 

Now you’re the one who’s tongue’s caught in your throat. 

And to your dismay, Eren notices.

A light chuckle fills the room, “Getting shy now?”

“N-no! It’s just-“, your voice gets lost somewhere along the way, because the green eyed boy kisses you again, like he has kissed you all his life.

“Y/n?” His thumb catches your chin, striking green eyes drawing hearts in yours, “You just made this the most amazing birthday I’ve ever had.”

The night ends with you thinking that maybe, someday you might also be able to tell him that this was the most amazing night of your life.

…..

A/N: Happy birthday to my favourite 2d boy❤️ this was a wip from last year that I’d forgotten about and finished 2 weeks ago, and I like it very much because it’s so light and cute and awkward and yeah<3 bye y'all

#Eren jaeger #Eren jaeger x reader #Eren #Eren x reader #eren fluff #eren jaeger fluff

[calliesmemes]

IN-CHARACTER QUOTES FROM DISCORD

UNHINGED SENTENCE STARTERS FEATURING THINGS SAID BY MYSELF AND MY FRIENDS WHILE WRITING AS OUR MUSES IN A CRACK-BASED NONCANON GROUP CHAT. This post is dedicated to Em, Liz, Tanny, Nellie, Mel, Ange, and everyone else in the server who recognizes these quotes — you know who you are 😈

CHANGE gendered words and in-universe phrases as needed.

SPECIFY muse for multimuses.

“   Have you forgotten that you should not steal someone’s property? ”

“   I could slap that smug look off his face right now! ”

“   Your ears are a lie. ”

“   Woah woah that's - that's a bad word. ”

“   I don’t know if it’s allowed and quite frankly I don’t care. Fuck the rules. ”

“   Time for gremlin activities! ”

“   I hate this man. Let's prank him. ”

“   We are all going on strike today I swear ”

“   Looks like I need to invest in a kid leash. ”

“   DONT BE COWARDS!! JOIN THE STRIKE!! ”

“   I support her saying what needs to be said! I am done with the silencing of women!!!! ”

“   I like the dramatics. ”

“   I did not ask for a second opinion. ”

“   You seem to be doing a great job at being a nuisance. ”

“   NO BITING MY EMPLOYEES! ”

“   do you want me to bring you cheese? ”

“   Next move, start chewing on the door frames ”

“   I like crumbs. They are like a little midnight snack in my bed at night. ”

“   if he wants to be a worm, LET HIM BE A WORM ”

“   the rest of you suck my toe ”

“   To be fair I am simply vibing. ”

“   I am going to commit a war crime! ”

“   I am manifesting being happy. ”

“   Am I gonna talk shit WITH you guys? because im down to talk shit about pretty much anyone ”

“   Who says? We shall revolt without question. ”

“   Let's just start burning stuff. ”

“   Did you just call me... small? ”

“   Can I convert you with my kazoo propaganda? ”

“   We were radicalised by The Little Mermaid. ”

“   Penny in the swear jar, now. ”

“   My last words are, bros before hoes. ”

“   The old men are trying to be trendy. ”

“   I can do whatever I want too! ”

“   Can we go one day without an interruption from an American? ”

“   I am so sorry. He enjoys conflict. ”

“   Why is he so tall? ”

“   For legal reasons, kids, that's a joke. ”

“   Would you like to fight the adults? ”

“   You're not meant to bite people, it's frowned upon. ”

“   He’s a fun killer, don't listen to him! ”

“   Ow! Stop kicking me! ”

“   I have quite literally begged you not to kick, hit, or bite today. ”

“   BUT I thought we were buds, pals, amigos, chums, friends. ”

“   Oh shiiiii someone’s in trouble ”

“   How much caffeine have you had in the last hour? ”

“   I'll be honest they wouldn't be so bad if they didn't speak. ”

“   Is this goof meant to be dead or what? ”

“   I am a witch. ”

“   This one reeks of self confidence when he clearly doesn't think before opening his mouth. ”

“  I call bullshit on that rule! ”

“   The point is I have a cane and I’m not afraid to use it. ”

“   If you slap me, I’ll cane you. ”

“   Yippee for women. ”

“   FUCK THE PATRIARCHY ”

“   Sorry for being British. ”

“   Oi who's playing that ominous music? ”

“   I'm strong because I eat carrots. Oh wait or is that to see in the dark.... it's for something. ”

“   I will say sorry when i'm caught, don't you worry. ”

“   AND YOU CALLED ME UP AGAIN JUST TO BREAK ME LIKE A PROMISE! ”

“   ... He's done for. Broken beyond repair. Someone play Taylor Swift. ”

“   Please refrain from punching one another. ”

“   He is becoming one with the spider I believe. ”

“   If anybody asks I will say I made you, then you will not get in trouble! ”

“   Can I be a girlboss too? I am not rude to women and I do what i like ”

“   Yippee for patriotism! ”

“   … i could make you guys rat costumes ”

“   Do you think if we started stealing bread we would lose our jobs? ”

“   why do British people ”

“   … you all need therapy. ”

“   Do you ever feel if you breathe the wrong way he will bite you? ”

“   I actively avoid whatever this is. ”

“   CARRY ME. ”

“   What if, and hear me out, they both promise not to do it again? ”

“   I wanna steal all his socks. ”

“   My socks were stolen! ”

“   Hey, watch it now. Only I'm allowed to insult me. ”

“   You couldn’t whisper to save your life. It’s pitiful. ”

“   Both of you are insufferable. ”

“   The law is overrated. ”

“   I’m afraid. Miss, you aren’t my type. ”

“   No. I swear on my life. I am being a gentleman ”

“   I support women’s wrongs. ”

“   ONE FOR ALL AND ALL FOR ONE!!! ”

“   GET YOUR ASS BACK HERE RIGHT NOW ”

“   He bites? Are you .. joking? Please say you're joking. ”

“   If you like piña coladas and getting caught in the rain ifyou're not into yoga if you have half a brain if you like makin' love at midnight in the dunes on the cape then I'm the love that you've looked for write to me and escape 🎶🎶 ”

#askbox meme #askbox prompt #rp ask meme #ask box #roleplay sentence meme #sentence starters #roleplay prompts #roleplay sentence starters #* sentence meme #rpc help

[hoedamn-eron]

he found the box of condoms - part 3 (finale)

You and Leto have to deal with the aftermath of your relationship.

Warnings: Age gap, but it is appropriate/legal. Mentions of drinking but it's isn't specified to be alcohol (but it's implied). An awful lot of dialogue. Some swearing. Angsty but happy ending. I have never seen nor read Dune (yet), so there may be some inaccuracies (Duke and Paul being OOC, stuff like that), but it's Modern!AU anyway. Slightly proof-read, as per usual. Word count: 3,025 GN!Reader, no use of Y/N.

FINALLY, I have this posted! Not some of my best work, but I was so aware that I hadn't updated this for 4 months!

Part 2

You wished you had declined your parent’s invitation to their barbeque.

It had been a terrible week. You had started your new job, but the person you were taking over from must have left the company with spite since they left everything in such a mess, that you technically couldn’t ‘start’ your job until everything was put right again. And there was a snooty woman (Harriet, in sales) on your office floor who had already decided you weren’t worth her time, and she seemed to have her fingers stuck in a lot of pies.

You’re dating life was a joke too. You’d been on a few dates here and there, from your adventures in the worlds of Tinder, and Bumble, but nothing went past the first date. They were all either looking for different things or just general walking red flags. The only ‘successful’ dates you had had were with your neighbour, Tom, who was a really nice guy, who treated you really well, and put an effort into your dates, but you had let him down massively by being too hooked on Leto Atreides. Now you can barely look at him when you happen to pass each other in the hallway of your building.

Speaking of your living arrangements, your apartment wasn’t working out like you thought it would. When you moved in five months ago, you weren’t prepared (or warned about) the excessively noisy neighbours, and the terrible water pressure, and the fact that your apartment was just freezing constantly. You’d already been on your landlord’s case, but he didn’t seem to care in the slightest, not now he’d had your security deposit and months’ worth of rent. You were on the verge of asking your parents if you could move back in until you could afford and better place.

And to top off your already terrible week, Leto was here.

You hadn’t seen him since he broke up with you six months ago, after you told your parents and Paul (who hadn’t talked to you since) of your relationship. It had been a hard time for you, obviously, practically seeing him every day since he lived next door to your parents. Of course, you didn’t expect your parents to stop talking to him, he was their friend before he was your partner (even though your dad had given him the cold shoulder for a while); but they could have given you some warning that he was going to be here.

“I’m sorry,” your mother said after pulling you aside to ‘help with the salad’, away from earshot of the other guests.

You were already shaking your head at her, giving her a tight smile. “It’s fine.”

It wasn’t, but you weren’t going to tell your mother who she can and can’t have in her own house.

“Your father must’ve invited him – “

“Really, it’s fine,” you say, placing your hand on her shoulder. “I’m gonna grab a drink.”

You really needed one.

Your mother soon went back to mingling and you hung around by the kitchen door, regretting your decision to come to the barbeque more and more. Everyone just seemed so chatty and happy, and like they currently had no problems happening in their lives. These people weren’t struggling to get hot water or being shunned in work by their new co-workers.

They most certainly weren’t in the same space as their ex-partners, still hopelessly in love with them. You did feel slightly pathetic, still pining over Leto the way you were, especially when he’d made it perfectly clear that it would be in everyone’s best interests that you separated.

“We shouldn’t see each other anymore.”

You had the feeling that was what was coming when he had said ‘We need to talk’. Nothing good every came from ‘we need to talk.’ But it didn’t stop you physically feeling your heart break in two, your body suddenly feeling like it would collapse.

Leto’s shoulders slumped as he looked at you with, annoyingly, sympathy. “That came out – “

“No, it’s fine,” you breathed, lightly shaking your head. “I get it.”

But it wasn’t fine, and you didn’t get it. You didn’t understand why you two would need to end what you had, just because Paul had thrown a hissy fit. But at the end of the day, you knew – deep down - Leto would choose Paul over you any day; he was his son, his flesh and blood. They’d both been through a lot since Jessica died. Leto would want the easiest life for Paul, and this wasn’t a part of it.

“I’m sorry,” Leto whispered, looking at you with those deep brown eyes, that you always thought held the stars. “I’m so sorry. It’s just you’re young, you don’t want to be with someone like me, an old man. And Paul is…I’m sorry.”

You shook your head at him again, disagreeing with everything he was saying. You both go silent before a wobbly smile makes its way on to your face. “We can always stay friends.”

Leto stared at you for a moment before giving a single nod. “We can.”

You almost roll your eyes at the memory, trying hard to ignore the pang in your chest. You hadn’t even remotely stayed friends. You wanted far away from him as humanly possible after that night. You were pissed off for a while, blaming Paul and wanting to wring his neck, but eventually you accepted that was just how life was going to go. Sometimes things work out how you want, and sometimes they don’t.

No matter how much you had wanted it.

You take a large sip of your drink, almost coughing at the burn down your throat. You truly didn’t want to be here. Maybe you could give your parents a discreet goodbye a quietly sneak out. Surely no-one would notice, only your parents had greeted you. Leto hadn’t even noticed you were here. You take a quick glance around your parents sunroom, your eyes landing on the God of a man himself.

He always looked so effortlessly good looking. He’d grown his beard out a little and God dammit, if salt and pepper wasn’t his colour. His white polo really brought out his golden tan, evident he’d been working in his garden with the nice weather you’d had the last few weeks. He didn’t look like his life was falling apart; obviously, Leto was a perfect human being. Nothing ever went wrong with Leto Atreides.

You sigh as you finish your drink, throwing your head back and looking back at Leto, before jumping out of your skin.

He was looking right at you, an unreadable look on his face.

You avert your gaze quickly, going to take another drink before realising it was already gone. Good, an excuse to disappear and avoid Leto’s coffee brown gaze. You make your way into the kitchen, intending to raid your parents appropriately named ‘drinks fridge’ for a good five or ten minutes. You weren’t ready to face him, even 6 months of being apart. It still hurt.

Once you had refilled your drink, you turn only to nearly drop your drink in shock. Leto had followed you into the kitchen.

Oh God, you’re cornered, there was no escaping him now.

“Hey.”

Why, why, did he have to have a voice that melted you from the inside out? It wasn’t fair. And you hadn’t heard him since you moved out, it shouldn’t make you feel like this.

“Hi,” you greet back. You curse yourself as the slight wobble in your voice, but you hope he didn’t notice.

He probably did, but he won’t say anything, because he’s just that nice of a person. He’s even looking at you like he’s causing you such an inconvenience talking to you.

“How are you?”

How were you going to answer that? Would you be honest and tell him that you were the unhappiest you’d been in a while, or would you lie? You could tell him that you were living your best life, that everything was absolutely fine with you, that you hadn’t had a few unsuccessful pity dates with your neighbour across the hall, because all you could think about was the Adonis of a man stood in front of you.

You’re taking too long to answer. The call of your name causes you to blink at him with a quick, “I’m fine.”

Leto nodded, an awkward silence filling the air. You look down at the drink in your hand, swirling it around the glass, biting your lip. You wanted to leave. What were you supposed to talk about? How miserable your life was? How he’s probably living his best single life with all the people falling at his feet?

“Your mom mentioned you’d…that you’d met someone.”

You couldn’t help the snort of a laugh that came out of you. Straight to the point. You shook your head as you look back up at Leto, a confused look on his face. “I wouldn’t say mine and my neighbour’s dates were something to write home about, pretty sure we’re not going to go out again.”

“So you’re not seeing anyone?”

“No.”

“So I can take you out then?”

You freeze, looking at him with wide eyes. What did he just say? “Pardon me?”

“I’ve been…completely miserable,” he said, huffing a laugh as he shook his head. “The past six months have been rough.”

The nerve! He broke up with you. He decided to end your relationship for Paul’s feelings, which you understood, really you did, but that didn’t mean you were going to just drop everything and crawl back into his arms. He’d ignored you for six months until today. As much as you were pining for Leto when you first spotted him, you couldn’t help but feel put out and pissed off.

Unnerved by your silence, Leto cleared his throat. “I spoke to Paul – “

“That makes one of us,” you mutter.

“He’s mentioned that he misses you and wants to make things right between us all.”

“He could have reached out himself instead of making you come and speak to me,” you mutter. “It’s awkward enough as it is.”

“He didn’t make me – “ Leto huffed, his shoulders slumping. “I’m trying here.”

“I just thought that my feelings meant just as much as Paul’s do.”

Leto sighed your name, closing his eyes in frustration.

“No, I get it,” you say, nodding at him. “As long as Paul’s feelings aren’t hurt.”

Leto looked back at you. “He’s my son – “

“And as I said, I get that, but he was also my friend. And he was a prick.”

“I know, I’m sorry, but you have to understand – “

“I do.”

You both stare at each other.

After a few moments, Leto shook his head at you. “I don’t know what to say.”

“You don’t have to say anything,” you counter. “We broke up. That was it. The relationship was evidently too much, so we decided to end it. And now you’re coming up to me, assuming you can take me out, like nothing happened?”

You knew you were being unfair. You had agreed to break it off too, but you had been having a bad week and you weren’t prepared for him to be at your parent’s house after feeling sorry for yourself. And for him to just approach you the way he did and throw his feelings back at you?

You wanted the floor to open you up and swallow you whole.

You found yourself suddenly laughing in disbelief, averting your gaze to look around the kitchen, mainly so you didn’t have to look at his heart-breaking expression, and so he didn’t see the overwhelmed tears in your eyes. “I really didn’t need this today.”

Leto didn’t say anything as you ranted to him, your stress and anger from the past few weeks coming out of you.

“Ever since we broke up, I feel like my life just fell apart. I lost Paul, and you, and my apartment that looked great on paper absolutely sucks and my landlord knows it but doesn’t bother to fix anything. My new job isn’t what I thought it would be and I have already rubbed somebody the wrong way, and I can’t seem to hold down a date with a decent guy, because all I can think about is you!”

You hadn’t realised Leto had made his way to you until he pulled you into his arms. You hadn’t realised you were crying until he was shushing you and whispering apologies in your ear, keeping you to his chest and he lightly swayed you. He was always so warm and welcoming, and always left you wanting to stay in his arms eternally.

You find yourself trapped in a wave of conflicting emotions. As the memories of the time you had spent with Leto flood back, you feel a mix of joy, pain, and longing at being held by him again, even if it was in the middle of a breakdown. Your heart feels heavy with the weight of regret, as you reminiscence on the times you had together and the things left unsaid when you broke up, how it was so sudden when you felt like your relationship had just started.

You don’t know how long you both stood embracing in the kitchen for, but you were vaguely aware of Leto waving your mother away, probably checking to see where you’d both gotten to. You heard your father call to the guests that he was going to start grilling, so you took that as your queue to get out of the kitchen. You pulled away from Leto, wiping at your eyes and avoiding looking at him.

You’d embarrassed yourself enough.

He watched you silently pull yourself back together before you finally look up at him, giving him a shaky smile. “Sorry about that.”

Leto was already shaking his head. “You don’t need to apologise. Ever.”

You take a few more deep breaths, finally calming down. “Did you mean what you said?”

Leto looked at you with a raised brow, before countering back. “Did you?”

Well, yes you did. You know you constantly think about Leto. He’s never far from your mind, you’re always wondering how he was doing since you moved out of your parent’s place, wondering if he ever got back into the dating pool, or if Paul had forgiven him (evidently, he did). Leto was the love of your life, even if you both chose to separate. And despite this, he was giving you the choice to get back together.

You eventually nod at him. “I did. I think about you all the time.”

Leto gave a small laugh of disbelief. “Then what are we both doing?”

You shook your head at him. “I don’t know. Everything was happening so fast, I didn’t…”

Leto gives you a small smile. “I understand.”

“I didn’t want us to break up. I didn’t want to be alone, without you, but you looked like you were doing so well without me and I was practically a pathetic, blubbering mess.”

“I’m sorry I made you feel that way.”

“I’m glad you were as miserable as I am,” you say jokingly, giving a small laugh.

The change in Leto is instant. His shoulders relax, and he starts giving you that small smile that he used to give you when you were having your long talks on dates. It was the smile that warmed your insides and made you feel gooey, like a teenager going to prom with the most popular person in school.

He stuck his hand out to you. “Shall we start again? I’m Leto, it’s nice to meet you.”

You snort but humour him, grasping at his hand as you introduce yourself.

“I just noticed you across the room and I have to say, you’re the most beautiful person I’ve ever seen.”

“You’re so cheesy.”

“I remember you used to like me being cheesy.”

You feel your cheeks warm as you gave him a light shove. “We just met, Leto, I don’t know what you mean.”

Leto smiled at you. “Want me to ask you out again?”

You couldn’t help but sigh dreamily at him. Your heart beats hard against your chest as you nodded at him.

“Can I take you out sometime?”

Your breathing quickens, and you still felt like you were melting against that smile of his. This was it. This was your opportunity to be with Leto again, to be happy again. You wouldn’t need to sneak around and you could be a real life couple.

But you didn’t want to risk being hurt again. What if the same problems arose, that Paul wasn’t okay with it after a while, or your parents? Would Leto break it off again? Would he think it was too much again and end things? You were still an adult and could make decisions for yourself; something that others seemed to forget last time.

But you could handle it. You loved him, and you were sure he loved you. And you could be together again.

You nod at Leto. “Yes. I would love to go out with you.”

Leto grinned. “Are you free on Saturday?”

“I am.”

“I’ll pick you up at seven on Saturday then.”

Before you could reply, Leto leans forward, his lips meeting yours. You melt against him, your eyes closing as you revel in the familiarity of their kiss. The way his lips fit perfectly against yours after so long, like coming home after a long journey. You wrap your arms around each other tightly, deepening the kiss, savouring every moment as if you’d never been apart.

As the kiss comes to an end, you both pull away, gazing into each other's eyes, feeling the love and longing that has been building inside you for so long.

“I’ll hide the condoms better next time.”

You let out a laugh before slipping your hand into his, leading him back out to the party. You choose to ignore the smirk your parents were giving each other as you join them.

Tagged - @m0nster-fvcker, @justanotherkpopstanlol, @eonnyx, @secre-flower, @shaggzthatsnottheworm

#dune #duke leto atreides x reader #duke leto x gn!reader #duke leto atreides x gn!reader #leto atreides x gn!reader #leto atreides #duke leto x reader #duke leto atreides #paul atreides #paul atreides x platonic!reader #paul atreides x reader #oscar isaac

[lazywitchling]

The Three-but-actually-Six Card Spread

I vote that we call this one Schrodinger's Spread, because I don't know whether I'm gonna draw three or six until I've already pulled the cards.

So, I used to try to do the usual three card spread. You know the one. Every tarot book lists it as Past Present Future, unless you have a quirky deck, and then they've probably rebranded it as something else. You can find lists of three card spreads with different questions to ask. IT'S A WHOLE THING. There's like. a whole three-card-spread industry or something. But anyway: it always confused me.

I am absolutely not a tarot expert. I put down three cards, and then I can stare at it for an hour going "I have no idea what this means." The standard guidebook keywords float through my head, but I wasn't sure how to make an actual READ out of that.

I started following @unhelpfultarot, who is anything but unhelpful. Seeing the daily two card pull and the way that the two cards are connected into (usually) a single sentence made the lightbulb come on. "Oh THAT'S how you do it!" So I started just reading two cards at a time, but as a single unit, like Lenormand. And once I got a handle on that, I started adding the third card back in. Then I'd have two pairs of cards to read! 1>2 and 2>3.

Well, at some point, I was like "Hey what happens if I put a card down below those three, and used that as a sort of connection-between-them card?"

So now it looks like this:

1 2 3 4 5

Where "4" is not its own answer, it's just what connects 1 and 2. The same thing for 5: it just connects 2 and 3 without being its own answer.

WELL, then I'm looking at that, and I said "Hey, now I've generated another pair, so I can lay down ANOTHER card to connect those two!

1 2 3 4 5 6

"Hey, Jes? That's... that's a six card spread..."

Shhhhhhhhh. Who asked you.

"Crow did."

Hush, imaginary reader.

Anyway, so now what I've got is the original read, the three most important cards, 1 2 3. And btw, this whole thing is usually to answer ONE SINGLE QUESTION, because-- actually, @windvexer explains it better than I can here. (HEY. YOU. DON'T SKIP THAT LINK, ACTUALLY CLICK IT, THANK YOU.)

So what I have now is one question that is answered by a sentence (1-2-3), with two cards that don't tell me NEW information but that tell me what each pair is saying to each other (4 and 5), with a final one that's sort of a TL;DR card (6).

"Jes. That is a six card spread."

CORRECT, and as @upthewitchypunx and others have said, if I were charging money for this, yes absolutely this is a six card spread, and you're not getting it for 50% off.

BUT HERE'S HOW THE WHOLE THING HAPPENS IN A REAL WORLD SCENARIO

I pick up my tarot deck. I think "I'm going to do a three card reading." I pull three cards, lay them down, read. If they make sense, cool, I put them away and move on.

If I get confused though, then it's upside-down pyramid time, and I'll lay down the other three. This either results in "Ohhhhhh okay, THAT'S what it's saying," or I confuse myself EVEN more (which is very easy to do).

In that case, it's still living in my head as a three-card-spread, because that's the important part that I'm actually reading. But if I set out to pull the inverted pyramid from the get-go, then it's a six-card-spread.

This is where I'm legally obliged to put PREMEDITATED in all caps for @friend-crow

My joking answer, which wasn't FULLY a joke, is that nothing I do is premeditated. I don't MEAN for there to be six cards, but here they are now, and I've got more important questions than "is this still a three-card-spread or is it now a six-card-spread?"

At that point it's like the tarot equivalent of "Is a hot dog a sandwich" and would just trip me up when I'm just trying to eat a hot dog. The answer is "WHO CARES! I got things to do."

(@asksecularwitch 'cause you also had thinky thoughts about all this, and I wanted you to see the upside down pyramid!)

#schrodinger's tarot spread

[damiansgoodgirll]

Omg so we all know rhea loves black so what about her girl being a complete opposite and loving everything pink, like her dresses are pink her car is pink and she tries to convince rhea to go to se barbie with her

that would be so much fun

me, who loves and has everything pink and my best friend who’s the complete opposite, convincing her to wear pink for barbie was the hardest thing i’ve ever done in my life.

plus this was so fun to write! and supernatural is my fav tv show too so i feel like rhea and i could talk about this for days!

rhea ripley x reader

tw : nothing, just a lot of pink, like a lot of pink

hi barbie, hi ken

you and your girlfriend rhea were the complete opposite and when you started dating a lot of people kept asking you if you two were serious or if you were just pranking other people.

despite your differences she loved you and you loved her too.

she grew up watching horror movies, supernatural, stranger things and all the things that scared you. she loved black. her whole house was black. the first time you slept in her bedroom you thought demons were watching you from how black and dark the room was. she loved rock and metal and knew nothing about pop music.

you, on the other hand, grew up watching gilmore girls and gossip girl. elle woods and regina george were your icons. you wanted to be sharpay evans and have all of her clothes. you grew up listening to britney spears and christina aguilera and you knew nothing about rock. legally blonde was your favorite movie and you made rhea watch it with you so many times she lost count. you loved pink, it was your favorite color. your clothes were pink. your phone was pink. your apartment was pink. your sofa was pink. your bed was pink. even your car was pink. your whole life was pink.

rhea almost had a heart attack the first time she stepped into your apartment or the first time she saw your car. too much pink and she wasn’t used to it, the same thing that you weren’t used to so much black.

but somehow you managed to get together and you were inseparable.

you were so impatient to see the new barbie movie but all of your friends were on vacation with their relatives so the only person available to come with you was rhea, but you knew she wouldn’t say yes. she hated barbies, she always did.

but nothing stopped you from asking her when you saw her getting home with some groceries. you were at her place in your perfect matching pink outfit when you saw her walking into the living room.

“hi baby” she greeted you, kissing your lips.

“hi” you smiled “how was your day?” you asked.

“good, how about you” she sat down on the couch next to you.

“it was good…” now or never “rhea, are you free tonight?”

“yes, do you have any plans? she smirked.

oh you had plans, just different from what she thought.

“can you come with me to see barbie?” you asked in your soft voice.

“absolutely no”

“rhea please…” you begged her.

“no”

“rhea…”

“no, i’m not seeing barbie” she said sternly.

“please? please please please” you kept saying. you really wanted to see the movie but going alone at the cinema was one of your biggest fear so you wanted her to come with you.

“no, i’m not coming”

“just for tonight…” you whispered.

you knew she didn’t like barbies but you never thought she would react like this. it was for a few hours and a movie definitely wouldn’t kill her.

“no y/n…i’m not seeing that stupid movie” she said and that was the last straw. you couldn’t believe she called barbie stupid.

“okay fine i’m going alone…” you said, standing up not even watching her and getting your things ready to leave.

she waited a few minutes thinking you were joking but when she heard the tingling of your car keys in your hands she knew you were dead serious. she rushed to the front door to stop you.

“hold on hold on…you’re not really going alone, are you?” she asked you.

“well my friends aren’t in town and my girlfriend’s acting like a movie could kill her so i have no other options…”

“let me put on my shoes…” she said giving up. she hated barbies but she hated seeing you sad and she hated more knowing that she caused you to be sad.

“for real?”

“yes, for real…” she said “but i’m not wearing any matching pink outfit okay?”

“okay!” you almost crushed her between your arms.

once you arrived at the cinema, rhea’s heart missed a few beats as she saw the majority of the people dressing in pink or in barbie’s outfits. she felt like an outsider and you couldn’t help the laugh leaving your mouth.

once inside you couldn’t contain your happiness seeing everyone wearing pink and for the first time in your life you felt accepted and not judged.

nothing to say, the movie was a masterpiece. you cried, laughed, danced and cried again. it was the perfect movie for barbie and you saw rhea tearing up a little towards the end but you pretended you didn’t see it because rhea would find a way to make you forget about it.

but in the end you saw her happy and she saw how happy and joyful you were after seeing the movie and even if she hated pink she knew she could make an exception for you and you only.

#wwe #women of wwe #wwe judgement day #wweedit #wwe smackdown #wwe superstars #wwe fan #wwe x reader #the judgement day wwe #wwe rhea ripley #wwe nxt #wwe x you #wwe one shot #wwe imagines #wwe imagine #wwe oneshot #wwe x oc #rhea ripley mami #rhea ripley one shot #rhea ripley fluff #rhea ripley x reader #rhea ripley #rhea ripley x you #rhea ripley smut #rhea ripley x oc #rhea x reader #rhea ripley x y/n #rhea ripley angst #rhea ripley imagine #rhea ripley imagines

[v3nusxsky]

Hey!! I have a Lady Lesso request ❤️

Female reader and Lady Lesso have an exclusive D/s relationship. Reader is her submissive, not her gf and etc

Reader has feelings for her, but doesn’t talk about it cuz she’s too afraid to lose what she already has with Lesso

But something happened with reader (you choose, it can be the death of a family member/friend, depression etc), Lady Lesso notices there’s something wrong with reader and confortes her and makes reader feel cared for and better

Basically a mix between smut (BDSM obviously), angst and fluff LMAO

Also, if you’re willing to can you make it LONG? I really love your writing ❤️

Complicated| mixed

*Authors note~ gosh my requests are really clocking up rn so I'm doing my best to get through them guys! I'm so sorry it's taken so long really the next few months are hella hectic for me. Kinda changed it slightly to g!p but you could imagine it as an enchanted strap*

Trigger warnings~ dom/sub non romantic, g!p lesso 🤭 r has depression triggered by family abuse as a kid sh daddy leo praise degradation punishments, free use r somnophillia mentioned voice kink, bondage

Prompt~ see ask^^^^

✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿

Bumping into Leonora at the cafe was the most unexpected yet magical thing you have ever experienced in this dull life. Something about the woman had you captivated, and no it wasn't just her extraordinary success in the legal word. Safe to say you caught her attention too, that's how she ended up slipping you her business card with two words scrawled beautifully across it, "call me" you weren't going to do it, after all it could've been a joke or perhaps you had imagined it all but the card sat in your wallet like a glowing reminder. She'd instructed you to call her and life seemed to push you towards doing so which is how you found yourself entering this agreement.

One small call ended up with you signing a contract with all the contents of being her submissive. Life had to be messing with you now, but then again it was about time you got something good in your life right? Leonora made it very clear that you could end the contract at any point like she could, strictly sex and nothing else but after care would always be given. She asked for details on your limits and hard nos she instructed you to choose a safe word and ensured you would want for nothing as her submissive and all you had to do was be at her beck and call. Easy right?

It was for the first six months, in those months you looked forward to the calls and texts from your dominant. Most of the time she sent a driver to come and bring you to her office, on the rare occasion you were called to her mansion where she would already be waiting in her play room, selecting out the toys she wished to use. Most of your punishments were carried out here as it was more of a practical clean up. You quickly learned that once after care was complete you were sent on your way, marked, sore and left with the beautiful memories of your time with her.

Some of your favourite encounters with her was the very very rare occasion you passed out in her bed and woke up to her girthy dick sheathed into your soaking cunt. Cock warming her until she was ready to use you again. Truly you were nothing more than her pretty little whore to use whenever she saw fit and that was something you'd began to like probably more than you should. Like wouldn't be the correct wording of course, you found yourself catching feelings for the red head but out of fear of losing the daddy dominant submissive relationship you have you decided it would be best to keep quiet. After all having her like this was better than not ever having her again. The idea of losing Leonora made your heart clench painfully.

You were a fairly good submissive really, only earning a few punishments here and there when you saw how stressed she was knowing it would help her relax, her favourite form of punishment was to edge you while you sat pretty of her dick warning it up for her to roughly fuck your throat until your make up trailed down your cheeks leaving you a needy mess in which she may even throw you over her lap and spank your pretty ass till it's all red. And yet you took it al like the good girl you are for her.

Leonora didn't truly realise her own feelings for you until she called for you and you never came. The disappointment and worry sat in her stomach like a rock leaving her more agitated as the hours trickled on. How could you not answer when she had summons you to! That went against the rules and the contract. You'd never broken a rule like this since the beginning, sure you could be a brat sometimes, but nothing unmanageable, truly you loved being her good girl so none of this made any form of sense to her now. Immediately, her mind jumped to the worst conclusions and that's where she decided being the head of her own firm got her privileges of her own, so she picked up what she needed and immediately set out to find you, first stop your apartment.

Leonora is a creature of habit, so it's to no ones surprise that she's had the same driver for years so he was absolutely use to ignoring what happened in the back of the car. Despite that he couldn't ignore the worried state of the normally stoic woman. "Ma'am? Are you alright?" He tentatively wondered out loud but was quickly met with the slamming of the divider in a response. Clearly Leonora wasn't in the mood for talking.

The car hardly came to a stop before the angry redhead was out and racing to the doors to find you. She wasn't exactly expecting to see your apartment absolutely trashed to high hell, which seemed very unlike what she had imagined, not only that there was shards of glass and some held a dried crimson tint. Immediately she began to panic and call for you, your submissive title, your name and even a love or darling may have slipped from her lips.

Finding you was the worst moment in her entire existence. Laid on your bed your arm littered in fresh bleeding cuts as you drifted in and out of consciousness. You skin seemed paler than before your hair knotted and tangled, the baggy shirt seemingly falling off your frame. How on earth could she have missed this?!

"Y/n?, my love please wake up darling" she demanded coming to apply pressure to the self inflicted wounds, wincing at your blood now staining her hands. "Let me go" you weakly mumbled trying to turn away from her. "No! Y/n ad your daddy I won't let you go! You're mine!" She all but snarled using her playing voice which seemed to trigger an innate response in your mind. "Leonora" you gasped in shock trying to rush to sit up, eyes darting around your depression room, "It's normally tidy I swear! Oh my gosh I'm so sorry daddy give me five minutes and I'll be ready for you!" You mumbled trying to stand up despite the wave of dizziness and her hands applying pressure to the wounds. "We aren't going to play right now darling, sit."

You sat back down, her tone leaving no room for arguments but her eyes somehow seeming softer than you've ever seen before. "Now, while I clean and bandage these, darling I demand you tell me what's been going on." You did as you were told of course, starting from the very beginning of your rough childhood and right up to the present day where you explained you'd been triggered off by a family visit, one of which they took great pride of telling you how worthless and unlovable you are. Hell one of your brothers even told you, "to earn money you may as well stand on the corner of the street, don't forget a bag over your face though otherwise no one will wanna touch you." You remember how they made you feel like you don't fit in there, like no matter how hard you try you just don't belong in their fancy world.

Leonora made sure you lived comfortably as per the contact so to hear such horrid words about the clothes and things she brought you just to see a small smile on her submissive before railing you into next week hurt. Leonora finished her work, satisfied they were properly taken care of before somehow producing the contract from her blazer pocket. "You see this darling?" She asked gaining your attention before tearing it apart. "Gone. No rules to stop me saying this. I love you Y/n truly I think I always have since that day in the cafe, I just wasn't ready to admit that I loved someone so beautiful. I'm setting you free Y/n to follow your heart, but never forget how I will always love you darling."

She loved you? Crazy. Insane. Unrealistic. But true. And by the way you slammed your lips onto her own she could tell that you love her too. So there was no need for contracts of deals when you both held love for each other. She could dote on you, spoil you, cuddle you and make love to you. You'd never feel this level of pain again, not on her watch. Your happiness will always come first. And she silently promised herself that she'd never leave you this long to check on you. Pulling away from your lips she moved to kiss each area of your bandaged arm, "you my darling girl, are so loved and worthy and I never want to see you hurting. Next time you come to daddy okay? I can help you my sweet girl."

It would take some time to navigate this new dimension to your relationship but none either one of you'd ever regret. Leonora was happy to take on you as her lover and her submissive and you soon found out you liked every side of the red head. The daddy dominant, the gentle lover and most of all your kickass lawyer of a soulmate. Life would finally look up for you and you couldn't wait.

Word count~ 1759

#anon answered #v3nusxsky answers #fanfic #anon requested #lady lesso #sfgae #leonora lesso #lady lesso x reader #lesso x reader #lesso x reader smut #lady lesso x you #leonora lesso x reader #lady leonora lesso #lady leonora lesso x reader #g!p leonora #dean of evil #dean of evil smut #dean of evil x reader #tsfgae

[am-i-the-asshole-official]

Aita for lying to my parents about quitting pot?

So weed is legal where we live, and I (22f) started smoking it when I hit legal age. I have suffered from chronic pain for pretty much as long as I can remember (insert joke about weed worsening memory) and though it typically ranges from mild to moderate, with exertion it can get severe. I couldn't do sports as a kid, field trips and some gym classes and even intense play would often end up with me unable to go to school the next day and still feeling worse for wear for up to a month afterwards. I've been to multiple doctors and had all sorts of tests done, as much as possible being not exactly wealthy, just to find nothing. I've tried hard to manage it in various ways; mindfullness and meditation, hot water bottles and heating pads, even essential oils and herbal concoctions, and of course over the counter painkillers. I've found these things to mostly only really help when the pain is low moderate to mild. As time has gone on it seems to be getting worse, but that might just be because kids are more resilient. I missed out on mostly everything that wasn't necessary in highschool because it was too taxing, even hanging out with friends. Now I've been living on my own since I turned 18, mostly with money that my parents put aside for me for the first few years, and finishing my schooling from home. But that money is now running out, so I have to work. Thing is, work that I can do from home has been near hard to find, at least anything long term. So I'm stuck doing the kind of jobs that exacerbate my pain, I'm in worse pain more often. But I've still been seeing doctors and they still say there's nothing and my doctor won't even consider prescribing me anything until it gets way, way worse. I'm also aware that anything I could get prescribed would be above my means anyway, and my parents wouldn't pay for it. So that's around when I started smoking weed. I did research and talked to my parents beforehand about it and explained why, and my mom (43f) didn't care, while my dad (45m) made me agree to only use it once in a while when my pain gets severe, only buy it with money I earned and never go out in public stoned. And for a while, I did everything like I agreed to. Don't get me wrong, the weed doesn't make the chronic pain go away, but it helps keep it manageable. I can actually work 2 days in a row. But now I smoke daily, sometimes even when my pain is moderate. My dad found out about this and demanded I completely quit or else he'll disown me. So I promised I would, and have been pretending that I have.

What are these acronyms?

#aita #am i the asshole

[heartmix]

Rebel - Kelly Severide

Pairing: Kelly Severide x fem!reader

Word Count: 800+

Warning: One swear word, mention of we*d (the whole fic is about this)

A/N: Just a warning, I've only seen half a season of this show and a full season of Med. So if I get a character wrong, my bad. Also, I mention that the reader is Boden's niece but she doesn't need to be blood-related. She can be a family friend niece or whatever you want to decide.

Masterlist / One Chicago Masterlist

Once in a while, everyone would be in a good enough mood to sit down and have dinner. No excuses about needing to clean the truck or refill the ambo. Also now excuses from Squad 3 that they were having an intense round of cards. Them being free to actually sit and eat together was probably due to the fact that you cooked dinner, something that was rare. Often you were too tired, but today felt different so you decided to do the task of cooking dinner for the firehouse. 

For the first 10 minutes, everyone was quiet. Other than utensils clashing against each other hardly any words were said. Everyone wanted to get a good amount of food in before a call would come through.

Although it wasn't long before someone started up a conversation. In a second the table looks like a real family dinner table, loud. The topic seemed to be reminiscing about being young, before becoming a firefighter. You were one of the youngest at the table so you didn't think they were gonna ask questions about the topic. Your youth wasn't that long ago. 

"What's one thing you miss when you were younger." Sylvie asked you seeing as you were next down the line.

"Smoking weed." You casually said which made everyone look at you with a raised eyebrow. They thought you were joking or not believing you.

"What? I work for the state, I can't do that anymore." You shrugged as if it was no big deal. You really didn't think it was, it was so easy to get the supply so it shouldn't be that shocking.

"You used to smoke weed?" Casey asked again still in disbelief as with everyone else.

"Yeah, who hasn't at last once?" You asked and soon courses of 'me' all spoke at once. Some of them had to be lying right?

"God you guys were boring." 

"Next you're going to tell us you got arrested." Otis quipped which made you gasp.

"Wow just because I smoked weed you make that connection, and no I haven't I just ran from the cops." You mumbled the last part not knowing why you were feeding them this information. Sure you were all one big happy family, but big happy families don't need to know everything about each other.

"What the hell, kid," Hermann said making you give a sheepish smile. The look on his face told you he was never going to look at you the same again.

"It was a different time, I was having the time of my life." You defended yourself. Sure weed wasn't legal in Illinois, but it wasn't bad. It was a herb.

"What else did you do?" Kelly asked who surprisingly has been quiet this whole time. He didn't look as shocked as everyone, but he didn't know you had this side of you.

"Uhh shoplifted?" You said in a questioning tone. Still, you didn't know why you were confessing all this.  

"How did you do a 360?" Sylvie asked impressed. You acted nothing like the girl you were talking about. Their young, sweet, rookie.

"I got sent to live with Boden, that's what happened," 

"I heard my name." You heard the devil himself say from behind you as he made his plate of food. He must have had an important call if he didn't come to eat right away.

"We didn't know your niece was a rebel child," Sylvie said making Chief laugh. He had the pleasure of watching you grow and is a big part of why you are today.

"Yeah, but look at her now." He said in a proud tone making you smile.

"Well he just made stop half the dangerous illegal stuff, I still smoked." You added not thinking much of it, you really didn't know when to stop.

"You what?!" He exclaimed making my eyes go wide.

"I thought you knew this!" You defended yourself. This was your sign to stop talking and not spill anything else about 'the time of your life.'

"No! How long did you do it for?" He asked making me gulp, all of a sudden you felt like you were 16 again.

"I stopped when I got hired." 

"You continued for 5 more years. You were smoking in college?!"

"How did you not smell it, I had some good shit. I thought you let me go since I was doing good in school." You defended for what seemed like the millionth time in just 5 minutes. 

"I'm going back to my office." He shook his head making you laugh. You knew it stressed him, but years have passed. He was just going to have a good laugh about it when he gets over the fact he couldn't tell what was happening in his house.

"Who knew you were such a rebel child," Otis said making the table chuckle.

"Oh like I'm such a good girl now. You older people are a buzzkill." You pipped in taking a jab at them, they were really showing their age. Even the younger ones who weren't that much older than you. 

"You got your hands full Severide," Sylvie said making your boyfriend shake his head in amusement. 

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